Joshua Nicholson and John Ioannidis conclude that “too many US authors of the most innovative and influential papers in the life sciences do not receive NIH funding”, on the basis of their analysis of 200 papers sampled from 700 life-sciences papers with 1,000 or more citations (Nature 492, 34–36; 2012). However, my reanalysis of their data suggests that the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has supported a substantial proportion of such contributions over the past 12 years.

For a random sample of 125 of the authors' pool of 700 highly cited papers, I found that 63 were reviews and 17 fell outside the life sciences. Of the remaining 45 original research papers, 34 (that is, 75%) were supported by the NIH (source: NIH grants database and my own analysis); the other 11 papers did not receive NIH support for various reasons (for details, see go.nature.com/nywiid).

Nicholson and Ioannidis further underestimate the NIH's support for groundbreaking research by requiring both the first and last authors to be principal investigators on an NIH grant when, in fact, first authors are often graduate students.