Acknowledging NIH Research Funding

The NIH has recently reminded the research community that all recipients of NIH funding must acknowledge Federal support when describing projects or programs funded – in whole or in part – with NIH funds. This includes acknowledgement in research publications, press releases or public statements, requests for proposals, bid invitations, and other publications or documents about NIH-funded research.

This reminder from NIH signals the potential for an increase in monitoring for compliance by NIH, so the University is bringing awareness of this requirement, including via a recent email reminder distributed by The Office of Sponsored Programs.

As outlined in the NIH Grants Policy Statement, proper acknowledgement includes the following three items:

1. Acknowledgement of NIH funding support, including a grant number in the correct format
2. Statement about the level of NIH funding, including the percentage and dollar amounts of the total program or projects costs financed with Federal money, as well as the percentage and dollar amount of the total costs financed by non-governmental sources (for NIH programs that require cost-sharing)
3. Disclaimer that says, “The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.”

Correctly citing NIH support enables NIH to assess award outputs and link publications to awards. Recipients should only acknowledge NIH funding on publications when the activities that contributed to the publication directly arose from the award and are within the scope of the award being acknowledged. NIH provides some key questions to help avoid improper over-citation; if the answer to any of these is yes, cite the NIH support:

• Did the personnel activity supported by the award contribute to the publication?
• Did the award support the conduct of experiments or the analysis of data that contributed to the publication?
• Is there a clear and apparent link between the work described in the publication with the aims and objectives of the grant?

For more information and examples of the proper acknowledgement format, see the NIH Communicating and Acknowledging Federal Funding webpage.