For each listed award, look carefully at six parameters that BRIMR uses for ranking purposes, namely:

Column A – ORGANIZATION NAME
Column D – FUNDING MECHANISM
Column F – PI NAME
Column J – NIH DEPT COMBINING NAME
Column K – NIH MC COMBINING NAME
Column N – FUNDING

We also rely on columns P, Q, and U when ranking cities, states, and Independent Hospitals, respectively.

Listings for awards designated as “R&D CONTRACTS” in column F often lack key information that BRIMR needs for its rankings. In the interest of fairness, we therefore omit R&D contracts from all our rankings of schools, departments, or PIs, though we do include them in rankings of organizations and also provide a list of them alphabetically by PI name. We treat all other funding mechanisms equally for ranking purposes.

The “combining names” (columns J and K) are standardized categories assigned by NIH. BRIMR only ranks entities that are classified as Schools of Dentistry, Medicine, Nursing, Osteopathic Medicine, Pharmacy, Public Health, or Veterinary Medicine (in column K), or as Independent Hospitals in column U. We only rank departments (column J) in Schools of Medicine. PIs are ranked in comparison to others who received awards under the same department type (column J) in a medical school (column K), regardless of their individual training or specialty.

Please pay particular attention to awards for which any of the above columns is marked “NONE”, “UNAVAILABLE”, “UNIVERSITY-WIDE”, etc., or is simply blank. BRIMR cannot include these awards in most rankings unless the missing information is provided to us.

We strongly request that corrections be submitted as follows:

• Send a concise email to that states your institution’s name in the subject line as well as in the title of any attachment. Entitling these as “BRIMR corrections for Acme University” is helpful for our record-keeping but “BRIMR corrections” alone is not.
• Identify the award(s) in question briefly but unambiguously. Stating the NIH project number (exactly as shown in column C of our spreadsheet) is usually sufficient. Line numbers are not reliable, since they may change during the review process.
• Clearly state the change(s) you are requesting. For example: “PI name should be TAYLOR, CAROLYN J” or “Column K should be Schools of Pharmacy”
• Changes for awards designated as R&D Contracts (in column D) should be limited to those affecting the PI’s name. Changes to these contracts are laborious and do not affect BRIMR’s rankings.
• Provide your own name, institutional title, contact information, and relationship to the award(s) in question (e.g., chair, vice chair for research, or grants administrator of the home department). If you are asking us to replace one PI name with another, it may be appropriate for both individuals to be copied.