Question
To ask Her Majesty's Government further to the Written Answers by Lord Drayson on 20 April (WA 329–30) regarding the disproportionate cost of analysing many hundreds of journals worldwide, whether employees of the Medical Research Council (MRC) make use of the PubMed online database.
Answer
The MRC does make use of the US digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature, PubMed Central (PMC), which is an open and comprehensive database of bibliographic information about scientific articles. Prior to 2008, however, there was no systematic way of identifying publications attributed specifically to MRC funded work using this dataset. Robust attribution of outputs to funding source is a significant challenge to all research funding bodies. In 2008 the MRC, the Wellcome Trust and others funded the US National Library of Medicine to extract data routinely from the acknowledgement field, where available in scientific papers, and flag this information in the PubMed dataset. This has improved information on papers acknowledged as arising from MRC funded work, but is still incomplete. There were over 2,000 MRC attributed papers flagged in PubMed in 2008, which is approximately 60 per cent of the output reported directly to the MRC by researchers. The MRC is working with publishers and researchers to achieve consistent acknowledgement of Government support in all research publications.