The National Library of Medicine just released a Notice of Funding Opportunity, NLM Grants for Scholarly Works in Biomedicine and Health, PAR-23-183. This is to help prepare major works and not just a single article.
“The National Library of Medicine (NLM) awards Grants for Scholarly Works in Biomedicine and Health for the preparation of book-length manuscripts and other works of academic and/or public health value to U.S. health professionals, public health officials, biomedical researchers, historians of the health sciences, and scholars of all disciplines working at the intersection of the digital humanities/data science and the history of the health sciences. Grants are awarded for major critical reviews, state-of-the-art summaries, historical studies, and other useful organizations of knowledge in clinical medicine, public health, biomedical research, and informatics/information sciences. Regardless of topic, there should be clear evidence that the scholarly work proposed fills a void and has considerable usefulness to the intended audience.”
The document lists several possible projects (but points out that the grant is not necessarily limited to those projects only).
- “Works focusing on the history or philosophy of medicine, public health and the life sciences, the development of medical research and health services, bioethics, and studies on the interrelationship of medicine and society.”
- “Works focusing on the history or philosophy of biomedical informatics, computational biology, health information sciences, health communications, or health sciences librarianship.”
- “Analytical and comprehensive critical reviews which identify the present status of research and practice in various health-related fields, addressing advances which have been made, problems requiring examination, and emerging trends.”
I was thinking that a critical review of the publications associated with COVID-19 would be worth proposing. There is a fairly comprehensive list of all publications hosted at Pubmed that I have already helped one student with. She reviewed 40 studies randomly selected from that data frame and found that while almost all of the studies placed the full free text on the web, very few of them offered to share the data that they collected.
I’d like to expand this small pilot to a larger sample and expand the information collected on these studies. It would require a small team of students, but the actual process is fairly straightforward.
The grant mechanism is a G13 grant, which is limited to two years, and $70,000 per year. More details about this grant opportunity is available in html format.