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Measuring Research Productivity

The donors who contribute to the AKC Canine Health Foundation have made significant investments in our organization. They invest time by surveying their breed associations about their health concerns, they invest their money through sponsorship of research, and most importantly, they invest trust in the AKC Canine Health Foundation that their time and money will be used wisely.

While both the AKC Canine Health Foundation and the researchers we fund have the desire to solve our health problems, the complexity of many canine diseases makes it impossible to hit a homerun in a single project. Rather, the success or failure of biomedical research is measured by the contribution of a given project to the greater understanding of the disease under study. One tangible measurement of this contribution is through peer-reviewed publication of study results. Peer-reviewed publications are accessible to all researchers in the field, and each paper becomes the next stepping stone on the path to solving the problem and finding a cure.

The AKC Canine Health Foundation rigorously tracks the tangible outcomes of our funded research. We regularly evaluate both the quantity and quality of the publications that result from donor investments. Quantity is easily defined: As of October 2012, the AKC Canine Health Foundation has contributed to 115 peer-reviewed publications in both veterinary journals, such as the Journal of Veterinary Internal Medicine, and journals with broad biomedical community readership, such as Science and Nature Genetics. Quality is less easily defined, but can somewhat be measured by how many times the original projects funded by the AKC Canine Health Foundation were cited or “used” by another investigator to make strides in the area of study. As of October of 2012, AKC Canine Health Foundation-sponsored publications have been cited 519 times, independently from the original research group. When self-citing from the original research group is included, our publications have been cited a total of 604 times. Importantly, every year we grow in our contribution to canine health and biomedical research.

List of peer-reviewed scientific publications resulting from CHF-funded research.