Check Out These Public Federal Funding Databases to Learn More About Funding at NIH and Other Federal Agencies

We often recommend the NIH RePORT (Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools) site to applicants & recipients because it publicly provides reports, data, and analyses of NIH research activities, including information on NIH expenditures and the results of NIH-supported research. The RePORT suite includes: 

• NIH RePORTER (RePORT Expenditures and Results) allows users to search for funded projects, investigators, publications, and patents. RePORTER also includes information on research projects funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Food and Drug Administration, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Health Resources and Services Administration, Administration for Children and Families, and U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
• Awards by Location and Organization provides year-by-year NIH funding data, filterable by organization, state, congressional district, and more. You might come across “frozen” data – this post explains the difference. 
• RCDC (Research, Condition, and Disease Categorization) shows the support level for various categories from grants, research and development contracts, and other funding mechanisms used by NIH, as well as disease burden data published by the CDC National Center for Health Statistics. Recent enhancements and new resources like the RCDC Categories At a Glance table have made it even easier to find funding information for various NIH research areas. RCDC categories are also available to search in RePORTER. 
• NIH Data Book gives a wealth of summary statistics on extramural grants, including the organizations and researchers that NIH supports as well as application success rates. See this NIH Open Mike blog for more. 

This NIH All About Grants podcast episode also shares ideas on how you may use RePORT throughout the grants process.  

Though these tools provide a wealth of information about NIH biomedical research funding, RePORT does not provide information on sub-awards or non-R&D contracts. Moreover, only limited data are available in the RePORTER database for other federal funders. In these situations, we encourage users to explore the following resources: 

• USAspending is the “official open data source of federal spending information, including information about federal awards such as contracts, grants, and loans.” Interactive tools are available to explore elements of the federal budget, such as federal loan, grant, and contract data. Importantly, it provides information on subaward data that you will not find on RePORT.
• The Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System (TAGGS) database provides detailed descriptions of grants, loans, aggregated direct payments and other types of financial assistance made by 12 funding agencies within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (including NIH). The grants data are at the transaction level.
• The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) / Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Awards database reports small business funding made by for 13 federal agencies.
• The Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS) provides visibility into unclassified information on all federal contract actions using appropriated funds over $10,000, which can also be filtered for NIH.
• World RePORT is an interactive, open-access database that allows users to map global research investments from various funders like NIH, the United Kingdom Medical Research Council, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, European Commission, Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and Wellcome Trust. It fosters and facilitates funding analysis and visualization of global biomedical research networks, linking investigators and institutions collaborating on research projects. 

Except for RePORT and World RePORT, NIH is not involved with managing the other funding databases. If you have questions, please contact them directly.