Percentile Ranking and Citation Impact of a Large Cohort of National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute–Funded Cardiovascular R01 Grants

Rationale : Funding decisions for cardiovascular R01 grant applications at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) largely hinge on percentile rankings. It is not known whether this approach enables the highest impact science. Objective : Our aim was to conduct an observational analysis of percentile rankings and bibliometric outcomes for a contemporary set of funded NHLBI cardiovascular R01 grants. Methods and Results : We identified 1492 investigator-initiated de novo R01 grant applications that were funded between 2001 and 2008 and followed their progress for linked publications and citations to those publications. Our coprimary end points were citations received per million dollars of funding, citations obtained Conclusions : In a large cohort of NHLBI-funded cardiovascular R01 grants, we were unable to find a monotonic association between better percentile ranking and higher scientific impact as assessed by citation metrics.