Do NIH grant awardees have access to the articles they need?

Abstract

Objective: The main objective was to find out to what degree our institution's NIH grant awardees have access to the articles that they cite in their publications. Methods: Articles published in 2012 as a result of current NIH-funded projects at our institution were retrieved using NIH RePORTER. Of the set of 328 articles retrieved, a final set of 71 articles was primarily distilled by removing duplicate articles and selecting one article per project. 4,581 viable cited references from the set of 71 articles were extracted from Scopus. The primary measure was the availability of the most cited journals (i.e. journals cited more than 5 times). Other measures included item type (e.g. articles, books), citation age, and the percentage of citations found in PubMed and PubMed Central Results: Of the 168 journals collectively cited more than 5 times, NIH grant awardees had current online access to 95% (160/168). Of all the cited publications, 95% (4,367/4,581) were articles. The average citation age was 9.2 years, and the median citation age was 7.0. Of all the cited publications, 92% were indexed in PubMed, and 32% had PubMed Central Identifiers (PMCIDs). Of the cited items which were published since 2008, 56% had PMCIDs (857/1,520). Conclusions: The library plays an important role in making sure that NIH grant awardees have access to articles. At our institution, NIH grant awardees have current online access to 95% of the journals that they cite most frequently.