Impacts of the CIHR Institute of Cancer Research 2001-2009

[ Table of Contents ]

References

  1. Institute of Cancer Research: Strategic Plan 2002. See also "the Institute Research Priorities 2001-2008".
  2. Palliative and End-of Life Care Initiative: Impact Assessment – Highlights and Conclusions.
  3. PubMed (US National Library of Medicine); ScopusTM (Elsevier), Web of Science® (Thomson-Reuters), and SCImago (a public portal into selected Scopus data, classified by journal, discipline and country).
  4. Now merged with the Canadian Cancer Society and called the Canadian Cancer Society Research Institute.
  5. Canadian Cancer Society Annual Report 1999-2000.
  6. ICR Annual Report, 2001-02.
  7. The Canadian Cancer Research Alliance "Cancer Research Investment in Canada, 2007", October 2009.
  8. There are several ways of accounting for the CIHR investment in Cancer Research.
    1. By keyword search, including all cancer-related keywords in the CIHR public funding database. This returns the amount of all grants and awards that were considered to be cancer-related by the applicants at the time they applied for funding. CIHR does not check the validity of applicant's keyword selection, and this number will include grants and awards that may not have been primarily about cancer.
    2. From ICR Reports, using the amounts reported by ICR in its annual reports, or provided by ICR staff: this number was obtained by searching the internal CIHR database on the primary research field selected by the applicant and validating the "hits" as truly cancer-related. This is likely to be a reasonable estimate of the actual cancer investment.
    3. By affiliation, searching the CIHR public database on all grants and awards where the applicant chose ICR as the Institute of affiliation. This is a voluntary choice of the applicant. Of those funded in 2008-09, and who consider that their work is cancer-related (keyword selection), approximately 50% choose not to affiliate with ICR, but instead with another of the 13 Institutes.

    The amount provided by ICR in support of its strategic research initiatives is shown by the black column. This number was derived from ICR annual reports and data provided by ICR.

    The black line represents the amount obtained by keyword search as a percentage of CIHR's grants and awards budget.

  9. From Year 5 International Review Panel Report 2000-2005 "Scientific Directors should now be given oversight of their Institutes and their associated (grant application review) panels. Each should be responsible for ensuring the balance of strategic and response mode funding is appropriate and that the panel system functions more efficiently."
  10. "CIHR Funding Pressures resulting from High Impact Health Infrastructure Investments", July 2007.
  11. Canadian Cancer Society Funding Statistics.
  12. Data retrieved from the Scopus database
  13. The NIH Almanac – Appropriations.
  14. This Web of Science data also shows the Canada's share has increased, but more modestly than reported using the Scopus data, from 4.1% to 4.8%
  15. The index of specialization (IS) is (% of Canadian publications in field X)/(%of world publications in field X), and if it is greater than 1, Canada is considered to specialize in that field. Fields indicated in lower-case (e.g. "chemistry") are the sum of several sub-fields (e.g. organic, medicinal and physical chemistry)
  16. Fig. 20 shows the percentage of Canadian papers with an author from another country for two three-year periods, 1998-2000 and 2006-2008, arranged in order of the most collaborated-with country in 2006-2008. Only data for the 10 most collaborated-with countries for 2006-08 are shown. Note the break in the y-axis to accommodate the USA data. It is not possible from these data to determine the number or proportion of Canadian publications with a foreign co-author, because of multiple counting of papers, i.e. a paper with authors from the USA, Canada and Spain would be counted three times and appear both as a paper co-authored with Spain and again co-authored with the USA.
  17. Oncology was selected because international collaboration data for this disciplinary field are readily obtained from SCImago (SCImago Journal & Country Rank), in comparison to the very time-consuming analysis that would be required for all cancer research using the Web of Science database. Oncology is the largest subfield in cancer research, representing about 38% of publications.
  18. Hopefully reflecting not a xenophobia but the extraordinary concentration of oncology expertise and funding in the USA.
  19. Citations, or the reference by others to publications, is regarded as an indicator of the impact, or importance, of a publication. An influential paper that presents important results or conclusions will be cited more frequently by other researchers. There are a number of ways of examining the citation performance of Canadian publications, relative to those of other countries and the world literature in general. Unfortunately, the very large number of world publications, and even publications from individual countries, exceeds the analytical capacities of the most useful database (Web of Science) for this purpose, and so a general analysis across all fields of cancer research is not possible. One way round this problem is to look at the representation of Canadian publications among the most-cited publications.
  20. We examined Canada's citation performance relative to that of the other top ten nations identified in Fig. 18, again using Web of Science data. As Fig. 22 shows, Canadian publications have ranked third or fourth in the average number of times they have been cited, for publications dating from all time periods examined. In other words, even back in 1999, Canadian publications were highly cited, and they have remained so through to 2008. There is no evidence that the increased number of publications in recent years has diluted their quality, and Canada's rank in citation frequency (#3 or #4) is higher than its rank in number of publications (#7 in 1999 and 2002, #6 in 2005, and #8 in 2008).
  21. Canadian Partnership Against Cancer Annual Report,2008 – 2009. The federal government, through Health Canada, has committed $250 million over five years for implementation of the Canadian Strategy for Cancer Control through the Partnership.
  22. CCRA is now co-chaired by the Institute and CPAC
  23. CIHR Institute of Cancer Research "Impacts of the Palliative and End-of-Life Care Initiative 2003-2009".
  24. At the time of writing, we could identify only a single article in the Scopus database that had arisen from this funding.