RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 Marginal Returns and Levels of Research Grant Support among Scientists Supported by the National Institutes of Health JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 142554 DO 10.1101/142554 A1 Michael Lauer A1 Deepshikha Roychowdhury A1 Katie Patel A1 Rachael Walsh A1 Katrina Pearson YR 2017 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/05/29/142554.abstract AB The current era of worsening hypercompetition in biomedical research has drawn attention to the possibility of decreasing marginal returns from research funding. Recent work has described decreasing marginal returns as a function of annual dollars granted to individual scientists. However, different fields of research incur varying cost structures. Therefore, we developed a Grant Support Index (GSI) that focuses on grant activity code, as opposed to field of study or cost. In a cohort of over 71,000 unique scientists funded by NIH between 1996 and 2014 we analyzed the association of grant support (as measured by annual GSI) with 3 bibliometric outcomes, maximum Relative Citation Ratio (which arguably reflects a scientist’s most influential work), median Relative Citation Ratio, and annual weighted Relative Citation Ratio (which is more dependent on publication counts). We found that for all 3 measures marginal returns decline as annual GSI increases. Thus, we confirm prior findings of decreasing marginal returns with higher levels of research funding support.