NCI backs away from the R37 MERIT extension

Existing commitments will be honored but NOT-CA-14-023 makes it clear:

Effective immediately, no new nominations for NCI MERIT (R37) awards will be made.  In addition, NCI MERIT (R37) extensions will not be considered.

As a reminder, competing continuation R01s that score very well can be nominated for R37 which means that you get 10 years of non-competing instead of the usual limit to 5. That last bit in the quote refers to the fact that apparently these things can be extended even past the first 10 years.

 

A search on RePORTER shows that the NCI has about* 43 of these on the books at the moment.

 

*I didn’t screen for supplements or other dual entries.

The distribution of citations in the context of Journal Impact Factor

Nature editor Noah Gray Twittered a link to a 2003 Editorial in Nature Neuroscience.

The key takeaway is in the figure (which Noah also twittered).

In 2003 the JIF for Nature Neuroscience was 15.14, for J Neuro 8.05 and for Brain Research 2.474. Nature itself was 30.98.

Plenty of people refer to the skew and the relative influence of a handful of very highly cited papers but it is interesting and more memorable to see in graphical form, isn’t it?