READ ME
1) HOW CRISPER WORKS
CRISPER gathers and collates data from NIH sources. When you execute a search, information is pulled from NIH CRISP and paired with NIH financial data current as of the date and time indicated in the results. Sums are calculated from the data returned. IBC data comes from records of the NIH Office of Biotechnology Activities.
NIH records and CRISP have known limitations. CRISPER is not responsible for them. If you encounter an error that you believe is attributable to CRISPER, please contact us with a detailed description and a precise indication of the search that resulted in the error.
If you are familiar with NIH CRISP, you have probably encountered some of its idiosyncracies, such as duplicate results and persons indicated as "principal investigators" who don't work in that capacity. CRISPER does not attempt to modify NIH's information, it collates and relays what NIH provides. Thus, for the same reasons that NIH CRISP can require experimentation before finding the right search, you may need to experiment with CRISPER before finding the right way(s) to formulate your search.
A Few Hints:
- To overcome some of CRISP's limitations, restrict your search to "competing" or "new" grants whenever possible.
- Searches for specific organisms frequently work best using the scientific species name (except some viruses, see the CRISP thesaurus).
- Recently-awarded grants may not have been paid. Hence, they may not yet have an associated grant amount.
- Financial data is not available for internal NIH grants (we'll take it if NIH will make it available!)
- CRISPER currently pulls financial data back to 1996.
2) A NOTE ON NIH DATA DISCREPANCIES (Jan 2006)
When CRISPER was updated for 2006, Digital Notions programmers discovered errors in NIH financial data. NIH publishes its data in two (allegedly) identical files, one as plain text (.txt) and the other as comma separated values (.csv). But NIH's identical data sets are not, in fact, identical. In 2005, there are discrepancies between these two files.
There are a total of 102 grants that are indicated in one file but not the other. CRISPER must use only one data set. For 2005, it will use NIH's .csv files. This means that financial data on 56 grants made in 2005 will not appear in searches. None of these grants appear to be related to biodefense. To be thorough, however, we have compiled a list of the 56 missing grants (as of 31 Jan). It can be downloaded in .csv format here.
SEARCH CRISPER