Understanding the Collective Impact of the International Cancer Research Partnership’s Cancer Survivorship Portfolio: A Case-Study Research Impact Assessment of the 2006-2018 ICRP Multi-Funder Cancer Survivorship Grants Portfolio
Rachel Abudu, Kathryn Oliver, Annette BoazPURPOSE
The International Cancer Research Partnership (ICRP) is a membership organization of cancer research funders who work to share best practices, analyze priorities, and submit funding portfolios to a public database. All grants are coded using the Common Scientific Outline (CSO), which classifies research across a continuum of cancer research. While ICRP has examined funding trends, there has not yet been an evaluation of the collective impacts generated from ICRP funding.
METHODS
We conducted a forward-tracing research impact assessment (RIA) of ICRP grants funded during 2006-2018, coded to CSO 6.1 patient care and survivorship issues and 6.6 end of life care using the Canadian Academy of Health Science’s RIA Framework to trace the downstream outputs and impacts of this portfolio. We measure the impacts of ∼4,000 grants from ∼100 partners across 24 indicators in five impact domains, using Dimensions.Ai, Overton, and public data sources to conduct our assessment.
RESULTS
Starting with 4,341 deduplicated grants from ICRP funders, we found ∼70% of these grants (n = 3,104) were identified in Dimensions using grant ID and/or project title. We found that less than half of these grants (45.7%, n = 1,419) were linked to a publication in Dimensions via a grant ID, frequently due to a lack of grant-level attribution within publication funding acknowledgements. Approximately 18% of the ICRP cancer survivorship grants portfolio was coded to research training or career development; however, these grants accounted for less than 5% of the total ICRP portfolio spend during this time. Further, 27.4% of the 3,104 grants were linked to policy documents in Overton via a matching linked DOI (as identified via Dimensions). Only about 1% of linked publications were cited within the NCI Physician Data Query resources for supportive and palliative care. Despite evidence of a range of impacts generated from a large research portfolio, qualitative survey data from Cancer Nation reveals that cancer care satisfaction and cost of care remain current challenges for patients.
CONCLUSION
Our study reveals practical insights for funders, seeking to measure the impacts of cancer survivorship research and the translation of such research into policy, and research evaluators who may conducting similar assessments of their own.