Finding Information About NIH-Funded Research on NIH RePORTER

Would you like to find out what research projects the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH)—or the entire National Institutes of Health (NIH)—has funded on a complementary and integrative health topic?

Try searching NIH RePORTER¹, found online at reporter.nih.gov. RePORTER gives you access to an extensive database of information on NIH-funded research projects.

RePORTER was updated in 2020. The new version has several features that make it easier to use, including:

• A single Quick Search box that accepts multiple types of information, including text, investigators’ names, and project numbers
• The ability to refine search results without rerunning the search
• All information on a project displayed together on a single page

Let’s try a search.

Searching for Projects on Tai Chi

Perhaps you’re interested in finding out about research projects on tai chi.

Go to reporter.nih.gov and enter tai chi in the Quick Search box. Click on Search.

You’ll get a list of projects funded by NIH Institutes and Centers (ICs) or certain other agencies, with the most recent projects listed first.

To see information about a project in your search results list, click on the title of the project. You’ll see extensive information, including:

• An abstract of the project
• A statement about its public health relevance
• Details about the principal investigators, the Federal agency program official, start and end dates, and the amount of funding
• A link to the original funding opportunity announcement (FOA)
• Lists of publications, patents, and outcomes from the project

Refining Your Search

There are two ways to refine a RePORTER search: (1) using filters and (2) adding more search terms.

The filters are on the left-hand side of the search results page. They look like this:

Let’s say you want to refine your search to include only NCCIH-funded projects. Click on Agencies in the Filters list and you’ll see this:

Click on the > symbol after NIH, and a list of NIH ICs will come up. You can click on the NIH/NCCIH checkbox to obtain your list.

The other option is to add NCCIH as a search term in the box at the top of your search results, and then click on Search.

Either approach will give you the results you’re looking for.

Types of Information You Can Put in the Quick Search Box

In addition to words that would appear in the abstract of a study (such as “tai chi”), you can use other types of search terms in the Quick Search box, such as:

• The investigator’s name
• The funding agency (such as NCCIH)
• The project (grant) number
• The name of the university or other institution that received the grant
• The year

If Quick Search Doesn’t Work

The Quick Search feature of NIH RePORTER was designed around the most frequently searched items, such as investigator names, institutions, and grant numbers. Less common types of search terms may not produce results.

If Quick Search doesn’t give you the results you want, try the Advanced Projects Search box on the NIH RePORTER homepage. It enables you to perform very specific searches using a wide variety of fields.

We tried searching for an FOA number, RFA-AT-19-008. Quick Search did not yield any results, but this Advanced Project Search field did.

When we entered the FOA number in the correct format, the search brought up information about the five projects that NCCIH has funded in response to this FOA.

Find Out More

You can get more details about NIH RePORTER and the types of information it can provide from this FAQ, which can also be reached from the RePORTER homepage.   

For More Information