For the program review, we want to display information about grants that
NBER family members have that are not administered through NBER.
Unfortunately, the only way to do this is to download most of NSF and
NIH's grant awards databases and then search for the PI by name. This
results in many false positives - researchers with the same or similar
name in other fields doing totally different research, or at a different
institution.
Here is an example:
http://admin.nber.org/admin/tools/user/greport?username=james_anderson
James Anderson is at Boston College. Here is his web page to prove it:
https://www2.bc.edu/~anderson/
But there is also a James Anderson at Harvard who is an Atmospheric Chemist:
http://www.seas.harvard.edu/directory/janders
Our Program Review for James Anderson picks up an NSF grant to the JA at
Harvard:(may take a few seconds to load)
http://admin.nber.org/admin/tools/user/greport?username=james_anderson
You can see the title of the grant by mousing over the "nsf" hyperlink.
So we can eliminate the false match pretty easily, by adding the wrong
James Anderson to our exceptions file,
/homes/web/wwp/etc/exclude_grants_nsf.dat. The exceptions file says to
exclude specified triplets of name, instituion, and NSF directorate
(three-letter codes like SBE for Directorate for Social Behavioral &
Economic Sciences).
But my worry is, what if James Andersonthe economist moves to Harvard?
Then suddenly we will not see non-NBER grants of his, assuming they are
in the same NSF directorate as the false matches. Interdisciplinary
research is said to be more and more common.
I'm not sure there is a good solution, beyond asking everyone to be
alert for misses. If you happen to know that a given family member has
grants administered not through NBER, please take a second to check
their entry under
http://wwwdev.nber.org/admin/program_reviews/
or from their editor pageand speak up if you do not see their non-NBER
grants.
Please let me know if you have other suggestions,
- Alex
Received on Mon May 20 2013 - 17:02:51 EDT
