NIH funding and biomedical publication output.

An investigation of the relationship between NIH funding and biomedical publication output is reported for 229 major NIH supported institutions. A correlation of 0.95 was found between the amount of NIH funding and the number biomedical publications for 132 U.S. universities. For 52 hospitals a correlation of 0.89 was found. For all 229 institutions it was found that NIH provided 91% of the boimedical research support from major federal agencies, and more than half of the total extramural biomedical research support. There was no indication of either economies or diseconomies of scale in the number of publications produced by the institutions, which ranged from a few publications per year to over 700 per year.