Knowledge management and discovery software developer Collexis Holdings, Inc., US, has announced that it has been selected by the National, Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to deliver an application, Collexis Reviewer Finder Platform, to help find the most qualified grant reviewers.
NHLBI's Review Branch of the Division of Extramural Research Activities is seeking to optimise grant reviewer selection by increasing their pool of qualified grant reviewers. Using Collexis proprietary Fingerprint technology, the Collexis Reviewer Finder will deliver a list of the most qualified candidate reviewers, from 1.8 million Collexis Profiled Biomedical Experts, specific to the ideas in the grant being reviewed. The system will also identify potential conflicts of interest between the reviewers and the grant authors based on publication, co-author relationships or institutional affiliations.
As a result, NHLBI's Review Branch of the Division of Extramural Research Activities will have a larger candidate pool of qualified reviewers to choose from. The programme is also expected to reduce the amount of time staff spends on reviewer searches. A similar environment deployed with another funding organisation has been shown to save over 70 percent of the time required to assign reviewers.
NHLBI plans, conducts, and supports research related to the causes, prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of heart, blood vessel, lung, and blood diseases; and sleep disorders. The Institute also administers national health education campaigns on women and heart disease, healthy weight for children, and other topics.
The NHLBI contract expands the relationship between Collexis and NIH. Earlier this year, the NIH announced the results of a multi-year collaboration with Collexis for the Research Condition and Disease Categorization (RCDC) project which uses Collexis for Portfolio Analysis and Reporting on all funded NIH grant projects. Using this environment, NIH analyses over $20 billion a year in external funding.
The NIH and Collexis also announced that all internal NIH researchers and project managers would be a part of a Collexis built NIH Expert Locator system which was deployed earlier this year. The system is similar to the environments Collexis has built with leading academic medical institutions like Mayo Clinic and Johns Hopkins.
