NIH RePORTER
NIH RePORTER is the public database of research projects funded by the US National Institutes of Health, run by NIH. Through ScholarMuse, an agent sends a topic to the RePORTER API, optionally narrowed by principal investigator, institution and fiscal years, and gets back one record per core project with its number, investigators, institute, dates, award amount and abstract.
ScholarMuse tools: search_grants. Each successful call uses credits.
The web tool runs without an account, up to 5 runs a day per visitor.
Ask your agent
What your agent gets back
Every record carries id, source, title, url, license, attribution and retrievedAt. The fields below are the data that comes from NIH RePORTER.
search_grants
Each record also carries agencyCode (institute abbreviation), currency (USD) and amountScope. Rows for the same core project are merged, keeping the latest fiscal year among the rows fetched.
- projectNumber
- Full NIH project number for that fiscal year
- coreProjectNumber
- Core project number shared across years
- pi
- Principal investigator names, up to 10
- organization
- Awardee organisation name
- organizationLocation
- City, state and country of the organisation
- agency
- Administering NIH institute or center
- activityCode
- NIH activity code, such as R01
- fiscalYear
- Fiscal year of the award row shown
- startDate
- Project start date (YYYY-MM-DD)
- endDate
- Project end date (YYYY-MM-DD)
- amount
- Award for that fiscal year in USD
- abstract
- Project abstract, cut at 2,000 characters
What it covers
- Research projects recorded in NIH RePORTER, searched through its public API.
- The query is matched against project titles, RePORTER terms and abstracts, and every word must match.
- Optional filters: investigator name, awardee organisation name, and a range of fiscal years.
- Each record links to its project page on reporter.nih.gov.
Limits
- One call returns at most 25 projects (default 10). Without a funder choice, that number is shared between NIH, NSF and UKRI, so ask for NIH only to fill it with NIH projects.
- A topic is always required. There is no input for activity code, institute, state or award size; activityCode and agency come back in each record, so the agent can sort on them afterwards.
- amount is the award for one fiscal year, not the project total, and the tool does not add up earlier years.
- No publications, patents or sub-project lists are returned. Abstracts are cut at 2,000 characters, and an upstream request is abandoned after 30 seconds.
How ScholarMuse reaches NIH RePORTER
The connector posts a JSON query to api.reporter.nih.gov/v2/projects/search with no API key. Requests are spaced at least one second apart, in line with NIH's request-rate guidance.
Responses are cached for up to 12 hours, so a project added or updated in RePORTER today may not show until the cache expires.
API key: the upstream API can be called without one, so you do not add one.
Licence and attribution
Licence: Public domain (US Government work)
Data from NIH RePORTER (reporter.nih.gov).
Records that come from NIH RePORTER carry this licence and attribution. When you cite the data in a paper, follow NIH RePORTER's own citation guidance.
