The International Aging Research Portfolio (IARP) Team Announces the Launch of FundingTrends.Org

Online, June 19, 2011 (Newswire.com) - The development team of the International Aging Research Portfolio (IARP) today announced the launch of the beta version of FundingTrends.Org - a simple and effective online tool for comparing funding trends in biomedical research based on keywords and phrases used in successful grant applications. This easy to use tool is designed for scientists, policy makers and the general public looking for additional data points on trends in biotechnology research.
FundingTrends.Org enables users to compare governmental and private spending on projects related to biomedical topics worldwide. Once the topics are specified, the tool produces informative graphic representation of time-series by year and the total grant awarded. FundingTrends.Org uses the vast project database of Agingportfolio.org. "Our team is very impressed by the many trends analysis tools like Google Trends and Google Ngram. These resources are commonly used for understanding very general trends in search queries and literature without overwhelming the user with too much data. The International Aging Research Portfolio knowledge management system contains millions of grants and publications from many areas of science and may be used to get very granular and detailed answers. We designed FundingTrends.org as a visual resource that enables anyone to quickly understand the scale of investments into a specific area of research or biomedical funding trends worldwide ", said Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, the director of the International Aging Research Portfolio project.

About the International Aging Research Portfolio:
IARP is an independent non-profit initiative serving the aging research community run by a volunteer team of over 100 developers and category editors. It provides highly granular, current information to scientists, funding organizations and policy makers, as well as a platform for collaboration and research. Presently, the system incorporates grant databases from the National Institutes of Health, European Commission, Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Australian National Health and Medicine Research Council and other sources and provides a categorized directory of research projects linked to related publications within the MEDLINE abstract database.