Definition · Plain-language
NIH RePORTER
NIH RePORTER is the National Institutes of Health’s free, public database for searching federally funded research projects and tracing their resulting publications and patents.
The step most authors miss
Doing CRediT right? Don’t stop at the statement.
A CRediT statement credits you inside one paper. The recognition CRediT was built for happens when those roles are tied to you, persistently. Sign in with your ORCID — free — and claim your CRediT contributions on casrai.org, the home of the standard. They become a verified, portable part of your identity, not a line that disappears into one PDF.
Free: claim your contributions, then export a journal-ready CRediT statement, schema.org structured data, JATS XML, CSV or BibTeX — and preview your public profile. A membership publishes that profile publicly and verifies the journals you serve.
What RePORTER contains
NIH RePORTER indexes NIH-funded projects with their abstracts, funding amounts, project numbers, principal investigators, awarding institutes and host institutions. Crucially, it links each project to the publications and patents that cite it as a funding source, allowing users to trace the downstream results of public investment. Data are drawn from NIH grants systems and PubMed, refreshed regularly, making RePORTER the authoritative public window onto the NIH research portfolio.
How researchers use it
Applicants use RePORTER to survey the existing funding landscape before writing a proposal — identifying which institutes fund a topic, who the established investigators are and what has already been supported. Administrators and policymakers use it for portfolio analysis and trend reporting, while journalists and the public use it for transparency into how federal research dollars are spent. Searches can be filtered by fiscal year, activity code, study section and more.
RePORTER and the project number
Each result carries an NIH project (grant) number encoding the activity code, administering institute, serial number and support year — for example a number beginning R01 signals an independent research project grant. This structured identifier lets users move between RePORTER, eRA Commons records and cited publications, tying the funded work to its administrative and bibliographic trail.
Key facts
At a glance
- Definition: NIH public database of funded research projects
- Full name: Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools
- Operator: NIH Office of Extramural Research
- Links: projects to publications and patents
- Search by: topic, PI, institution, funding, activity code
- Access: free and open to the public
Common misconceptions
What people often get wrong
Often heard: RePORTER only lists current, active grants.
Actually: RePORTER covers many years of historical NIH funding, not just active awards, enabling trend and portfolio analysis across fiscal years.
Often heard: You need an NIH account to search RePORTER.
Actually: RePORTER is fully public; no login is required to search projects, view abstracts or trace linked publications and patents.
Often heard: RePORTER shows the full text of every funded paper.
Actually: RePORTER links to publications and their PubMed records, but full-text availability depends on the publisher and the NIH Public Access Policy, not on RePORTER itself.
Going deeper
