Analysis: 'Double-dipping' suspected in research

Dan Vergano USA TODAY @dvergano | USATODAY

Tens of millions of research dollars may have been awarded in the last decade to already-funded research projects despite rules against duplicate funding, suggests an analysis of science grant awards.

Government and private research funding organization rules generally prohibit scientists from accepting funds for the same project from different sources, without disclosing the money. Such "double-dipping" by researchers, however, may account for nearly $70 million in overlapping funds awarded by the National Institutes of Health, Department of Defense, National Science Foundation and Energy Department, as well as the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation, the study says.

"The impact of double payment means there is less money available to pay for other meritorious scientific research," says Harold "Skip" Garner of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., who headed the computer effort that looked for duplicated language in research grant awards stretching back to 1985. "Remember, the grant you fund today may cure the cancer you get tomorrow," he says.

Reported Wednesday in the journal Nature, the analysis comes amid intensifying competition for federal research funds. The $31 billion National Institutes of Health granted only about 20% of grant requests, compared with 30% a decade ago. The average age of investigators receiving awards as lead investigators for the first time has moved into the 40s, compared with the 30s in the 1970s. The U.S. Government Accountability Office last year warned that that federal research agencies needed better abilities to identify researchers submitting duplicate grant requests to disparate funders in a bid to make up for tighter funding.

The analysis initially sifted 631,337 grant award documents online (the Energy Department has since removed its records) using essentially plagiarism-detecting software called eTBLAST to find ones with high similarity in text. The researchers then reviewed 1,300 pairs of grant awards with similar wording and found that 334 looked to have "suspicious overlaps." The analysis stopped there because the researchers would have needed full grant files, instead of just award summaries, to be certain the money was truly requested for exactly identical research services.

Stretching back to 1985, the funds involved might represent $200 million, the analysis suggests, which adds up to less than 0.1% of research funding from the groups involved. But Garner and colleagues note that their software generally is too conservative in finding study plagiarism, compared with its extent revealed by surveys of scientists, indicating they may just be revealing the tip of the double-dipping iceberg as well.

"As a steward of public funds, NIH takes the issue of duplicate funding of the same project very seriously," says an agency statement sent by spokesperson Amanda Fine to USA TODAY by e-mail. NIH does allows researchers to initially submit duplicate grant requests to other agencies without disclosure because money from other sources is required to be revealed by researchers just before they are sent the grant money, the statement said. Science funding agencies typically trim funding when alerted to overlapping research awards. "Only a small number of grants (167 out of 631,337 or 0.026%) with potential overlapping funding were identified in the article, validating NIH procedures," says the statement.

In a followup analysis, Nature magazine looked more closely at 22 of the suspicious duplicate grants under federal open information requests and found about half looked like true overlapping requests not identified by funding agencies.