Evaluating British Columbia's performance in health research

This report represents the first step in an ongoing evaluation of performance indicators of health research in BC, and a continuing assessment of the return on investments in health research. [...] The blue (right) columns show the total combined funding actually received by BC in each year, and the differences between the two bars (shown by the orange line) reflect the gains in funding in BC due to improved performance. [...] Put simply, the CIHR funding awarded to researchers in BC in a given theme or topic is a function of the following: • the number of researchers actively working in the theme/topic; • the average number of proposals each researcher submits; • the success rate of the proposals; • the average duration of the successful grants; and • the average size of the successful grants (in dollars). [...] It is often the case that rapid increases in quantity come at the expense of overall quality; what is noteworthy in this analysis is that during the period of study, BC demonstrated not only the strongest growth in numbers of Operating Grant submissions, but also the largest increase in their overall quality. [...] While the ARIFs of the other provinces remained roughly constant over this interval, the ARIF of health research in BC rose from 1.07 to 1.15 and became the highest of any province.