Importance of Biostatistics in Academic Research Success

• Activity Number: 266
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 10, 2015 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Quality and Productivity Section
• Author(s): Li Wang* and Daniel Byrne and Hui Nian and Chang Yu and Frank Harrell
• Companies: Vanderbilt University and Vanderbilt University and Vanderbilt University and Vanderbilt University and Vanderbilt University
• Keywords: biostatistics ; NIH ; ranking

Abstract

Biostatistics plays an important role in the success of medical research providing guidance on study design and data analysis. Over the past decade, biostatistics helped increase the research quality and NIH funding. We collected ranking metrics from the US News&World Report for top 50 medical schools from 2001 to 2013. All NIH awards data (PI, department, NIH cost) that Vanderbilt received during 2013 were also retrieved. The NIH award metric is the strongest factor impacting the ranking, with Spearman's rho of 0.74. Vanderbilt's Department of Biostatistics has been actively involved in the applications of NIH grants/awards across numerous departments. In 2013, Vanderbilt received 785 NIH grants from 51 departments with total of $307,665,873, among which 24.6% (193) were supported by the Department of Biostatistics totaling $119,768,709. Larger NIH awards were associated with biostatistical involvement (odds ratio 1.79, 95% CI 1.5-2.13; P< 0.001). U, K, and R01 grants were most likely to involve biostatistical support. Biostatistics is an instrumental component of NIH grant funding in an academic medical center.