Can I make the point that the research funding ranking on the Ouija tab makes zero sense? I know whoever made that tab yanked it from the Blue Ridge Institute, but look at some of those numbers. If you go to NIH reporter (https://projectreporter.nih.gov/reporter.cfm), Rich Gallo alone has more in grant funding than the UCSD total in their ranking. David Fisher and Tom Kupper at Harvard together have over 2M in funding (the $47K listed for Harvard isn't even a real grant size...that's like not even the size of an F-series grant). For UCLA, Robert Modlin alone has over a million in personal funding, and UCLA didnt even rank. I'm not sure what criteria BRIMR used to come up with these numbers, but I don't think it represents the research strengths of a lot of institutions very well
OP: I figured it was something like that. Might be worth sticking a caveat statement at the top or something, as I'm sure these posts will soon get buried in the archive
maybe I will just paste this conversation. Do you have anything to add?
Mmm...unfortunately, as you righly pointed out, there's really no good way (that doesnt involve spending the rest of your life mining NIH reporter) to get a good sense of funding in dollars. One suggestion might be to add additional columns for "known clinical strengths" and "known research strengths" and weaknesses that people could go in and fill. Would be helpful for people with specific interests potentially, but could also be very skewed/biased. As for the research side, id honestly just strip out the NIH funding ranking from BRIMR, as I think its so misrepresentative as to be actually harmful
Not going to pull the data as I think it is valuable to have accessible in a central location here, but would warn people that low numbers or blanks do not mean a program is receiving little/no funding. If there is anyone here who would like to do some data mining and get a better estimate of values, please let us know and we can work with you on that.
Yeah, youre right about that. I actually asked Modlin about it and he basically said that the NIH funding list only includes Dermatology DEPARTMENTS. At places like UCLA, for example, there is a Dermatology Division under the Department of Medicine, so their NIH grant totals are found in the sum for DOM (and cannot easily be separated out in the data they publish). Places like MGH/BWH also dont funnel their NIH grants through a Department of Dermatology, so the numbers are skewed. This is part of the reason why it is so difficult to come up with rankings of Dermatology programs.... and thus why I labeled it as "Ouija" -- its basically as good as a psychic reading and certainly not to be taken as "the whole picture"! Hope this helps. As a side note, Doximity rankings are equally as bad (if not worse). There is a bias because programs can reward people for going in and ranking and there has been skewing due to these pactices.