1. Data Sources
ScienceDex is built from official NIH public award data. Current-year data comes from the NIH RePORTER API v2, which exposes project numbers, award amounts, fiscal years, principal investigators, institutions, department codes, and related award metadata.
Historical records are reconciled against NIH ExPORTER bulk files where flat-file downloads are better suited for reproducible, multi-year analysis.
Data freshness notice
ScienceDex currently displays FY2026 NIH award data. This release matched NIH RePORTER's current fiscal year when checked on 2026-07-13. Check NIH RePORTER.
Included award data
- Extramural NIH grant mechanisms, including R, P, U, K, T, and F series awards.
- Subcontract records returned by NIH RePORTER, attributed to the performing institution.
- R&D contracts in all-institution rankings only, where contract scale is informative.
- Intramural NIH research program funding is excluded because it is not reported as extramural grants.
2. Processing Pipeline
- 1
Ingest public NIH records
Fetch award records from NIH RePORTER API v2 and ExPORTER bulk files, then publish a versioned fiscal-year snapshot. The displayed release remains fixed until the ingestion and ranking refresh completes.
- 2
Deduplicate awards
Group project records by project number and fiscal year, then sum award amounts across related subprojects when needed.
- 3
Normalize institutions
Apply curated alias mappings so name variants, campus labels, and renamed entities roll up to canonical institution records.
- 4
Classify departments
Map NIH IMPAC II department codes into 27 standard basic-science and clinical-science department categories.
- 5
Aggregate and rank
Sum qualifying award dollars by ranking type, sort descending, and use grant count and investigator count as deterministic tie-breakers.
- 6
Publish indexed profiles
Store ranking tables and profile data for institution, medical-school, department, investigator, geographic, and discipline pages.
3. Institution Standardization
NIH records often contain multiple names for the same organization. A single university can appear under campus names, hospital affiliates, old legal names, abbreviations, or medical-school labels. ScienceDex applies curated alias mappings so records roll up to a canonical institution before ranking.
| NIH record pattern | Canonical handling |
|---|---|
| Renamed schools or legacy names | Mapped to the current institution name. |
| Campus-specific naming variants | Rolled up when they represent one integrated institution. |
| Teaching hospitals and affiliates | Handled according to the ranking view and affiliation rules. |
4. Department Classification
Department rankings use NIH department codes and map them into 27 standard medical department categories. The taxonomy separates basic-science departments from clinical departments so users can compare similar research areas across schools.
Basic science
- Anatomy and Cell Biology
- Biochemistry
- Biomedical Engineering
- Genetics
- Microbiology and Immunology
- Neurosciences
- Pharmacology
- Physiology
Clinical science
- Anesthesiology
- Dermatology
- Emergency Medicine
- Internal Medicine
- Neurology
- Pediatrics
- Psychiatry
- Radiology
- Surgery
- Urology
Representative list. The full classification covers 19 clinical departments.
5. Ranking Computation
ScienceDex ranks by simple summation instead of hidden weighting. The goal is for a researcher, administrator, or vendor to understand exactly why one record appears above another.
| Primary metric | Total NIH award dollars for the selected fiscal year. |
|---|---|
| Sort order | Descending by total funding. |
| Tie-breaking | Grant count first, then investigator count. |
| Weighting | No weighting by award type, institution size, or discipline. |
| Inflation | Dollar figures are nominal and are not inflation-adjusted. |
| Fiscal year | Rankings are computed per NIH fiscal year, not multi-year averages. |
6. Ranking Views
Medical Schools
Schools of medicine ranked by extramural NIH grant funding, excluding R&D contracts for comparability.
Institutions
Universities, hospitals, research institutes, government labs, and other NIH-funded organizations.
Departments
Twenty-seven medical department categories ranked within and across institutions.
Investigators
Principal investigators ranked by the full amounts on FY2026 award records that list them. These are award-linked amounts, not a PI share of each award.
Geographic
State-level and city-level funding summaries, with per-capita context where available.
Disciplines
National funding patterns across basic-science and clinical-science disciplines.
8. Known Limitations
- Subcontracts: NIH subcontract records can make multi-site awards appear in both prime and subcontract contexts.
- Timing: NIH records can be corrected after publication, so rankings represent the data snapshot used for the release.
- Department codes: Awards without department codes remain in institution and investigator views but cannot be attributed to a department ranking.
- Multi-PI awards: Awards are attributed from NIH award metadata. Each named PI is linked to the full award amount, so investigator totals and PI-award assignment counts exceed unique-award totals. They should not be read as the investigator's personal funding share.
- Nominal dollars: Historical funding is shown in reported dollars, not inflation-adjusted dollars.
9. Reproducibility
ScienceDex methods are designed to be inspectable from this page: data sources, normalization rules, ranking computations, and limitations are documented together so users can understand how each ranking view is produced.
This Methods page is maintained alongside the ConductScience ScienceDex integration. Current displayed rankings use FY2026 data.