New Feature Highlights

To help you find NIH-supported projects or locate investigators engaged in a particular area of research, a new icon to search for “Similar Projects” appears next to each project on the Search Results hit list (fiscal year 2007 and later projects only). Clicking this icon will display up to 100 other projects similar to the selected project.  Similarity is based on the degree of overlap among the projects’ keywords (the set of project terms appearing on the Description tab of each Project Information page). The list of Similar Projects also can be modified to change the fiscal year, NIH spending category, Agency/Institute/Center, and activity code of projects included in the list, or to exclude subprojects. A Similar Projects tab has been added to each project's Project Information page too.

Another feature to help you find research by topic is an ‘Advanced’ capability added to Text Search. You can now use Boolean operators (and, or, not, and parentheses to control precedence) in your text search by selecting the 'Advanced' logic radio button. For example, if you're interested in addiction research, but not prevention efforts, you might enter the query (“drug abuse” or “smoking cessation”) not prevention into the text search box. The other Text Search radio buttons, And and Or, work the way they always have: will find projects that include all of the keywords entered; will find projects containing any of the keywords.

In addition, you can now limit Text Search to abstracts, project titles or project terms, or any combination of the three.

A new Share Hit List capability allows you to quickly disseminate RePORTER Search Results to colleagues. After submitting a query and getting search results in return, click the share button A box will open to allow you to enter a recipient's email address and send an email containing a hyperlink to your search results. (A new RePORTER capability also allows you to save search results to a project portfolio that can be shared. See Create and Share a Portfolio of Projects, later in this issue.)

A new "Links" tab has been added to the RePORTER Search Results and each Project Information page. To truly take advantage of the existing world-wide web of information on biomedical research, this tab provides hyperlinks to additional information outside the RePORTER system that may be related to your search results.

For example, the Links tab is where you will find links to investigators' institutional profile or lab websites. (See Issue 2 of The ReSource for information on how investigators can create PI Profile links.)

In addition to PI profile links, from either Search Results or an individual Project Information page, you can see RePORTER projects on a "topic map" created by NIHMaps.Org. This tool allows you to display a hit list or an individual project on a map of all NIH-funded research, see what areas of research are covered by projects in the hit list, and find other research being conducted in similar areas. Select a Fiscal Year to map (2007 and later only) and click the "View Topic Map" button for a cluster-based visualization of the projects in the search results. Currently, the mapping feature is limited to hit lists of 500 or fewer projects funded in any single fiscal year.

We hope that the number of links out from RePORTER will grow as more linkages are formed between RePORTER data and other public databases (see the National Library of Medicine's vast array of public databases or  Health.Data.gov) and new tools are developed to exploit the RePORTER database (downloadable from the ExPORTER page). Suggestions for new tools to feature on the Links tab are always welcome!

We occasionally hear users express concerns surrounding the availability of email addresses in RePORTER. While NIH has made these available since the CRISP system (precursor to RePORTER) was launched in the 1990s, the release of RePORTER brought renewed attention to their availability. We supply email addresses to facilitate collaboration and promote the dissemination, use, and translation of research and its results.

Of course, RePORTER does not supply−and will not give, sell, or otherwise transfer−these addresses to any party for the purposes of initiating, or enabling others to initiate, commercial electronic mail messages. To further ensure that the email addresses we supply are not harvested automatically for use in promotional campaigns, a verification code (i.e., input by a human being) is now required to view principal investigator and NIH program official email addresses on the Project Information Details page. Although this makes it a little more inconvenient to contact an investigator or program official, we felt the added assurance would be appreciated by all.

Now up to 15,000 projects can be exported from RePORTER by selecting the ‘Basic’ export tab in the field selection box. This allows you to download large numbers of projects if you only need the most frequently used data fields. This is an increase from the current limit of 5,000.

In Issue 2 of The ReSource we announced the ability to subscribe to weekly alerts of new projects added to the RePORTER database that match any of the queries you’ve saved in MyRePORTER. Now you also can receive an alert when a new publication appears in PubMed that acknowledges support from any project matching your query. To receive publication alerts, simply log in to your MyRePORTER account and, on the Saved Queries Dashboard, you will notice that the Alerts section contains columns for both project and publication alerts. You may choose to receive alerts of new projects in RePORTER that match a query, alerts of new PubMed publications that cite support from projects that match a query, or both.

Check the boxes next to the saved queries for which you would like to receive alerts and you will be enrolled to receive a weekly email alerting you to new projects and/or publications. (If you are new to MyRePORTER, see how to register in the RePORTER Manual.)

MyRePORTER users can now store search results to portfolios of projects. To create a portfolio, use the checkboxeson the Search Results hit list to select the projects to be added and click the ‘Add to Portfolio’ button. You have the option of creating a new portfolio or adding the selected projects to an existing one. If you’d like to share the portfolio with someone else, use the email icon on the MyRePORTER Dashboard to send an email. The recipient will receive a link they can follow to a RePORTER Search Results page with your portfolio.

By popular demand, ExPORTER will now provide weekly updates to the database instead of monthly. No longer wait for a month to get updated files. Each week’s files will be available the following week so ExPORTER’s file generation will be in sync with the weekly RePORTER data refresh.

Three existing sections of the RePORT site—Award Data for Individual Organizations, NIH Extramural Awards by State and Foreign Site, and NIH Extramural Awards by State and Congressional District—will soon be replaced by an enhanced version of the NIH Awards by Location and Organizations page.  The Awards by Location and Organizations tool is being enhanced to include all of the information currently available through these other pages, providing a single place to go for all information on the organizations that NIH supports, including interactive maps and downloadable datasets.  We anticipate these changes to be available by the end of November.  Until then, all three of the older sites will remain accessible.

The RePORT website is now almost four years old. According to some estimates, that’s 40 in internet years! It’s about time that RePORT start taking better care of itself, so look for a revitalized RePORT in the coming weeks. A streamlined, high performance approach and new user interface will make working with RePORT more intuitive and save you time retrieving data and finding NIH reports.

In a recent post on her Rock Talk blog, Dr. Sally Rockey, NIH Deputy Director for Extramural Research, describes an evaluation study of the NIH Individual Mentored Career Development Awards Program. Readers can access her blog for more detail.