The Agency for Scientific Affairs of the SEC sent the necessary information on the grants to build a data extraction sheet and obtain descriptive information on the different grants awarded and then link them to the scientific publications derived from the projects. The following variables were collected: identification number, name of the principal investigator, affiliation of the center, city of the center, type of grant, and its size.

As part of the second specific objective, a search was performed to identify scientific publications that were possibly derived from the development of projects financed with any of the grants awarded by the SEC/FEC in the period of interest.

To consider a publication a by-product of a research project funded by the SEC/FEC, the following inclusion criteria were established. The work needed to a) be published in a peer-reviewed journal and indexed in some of the main bibliographic databases in the biomedical field (MEDLINE and EMBASE were considered the main sources of information in biomedicine); b) have a publication date after the grant was awarded; c) be authored by the principal investigator receiving the grant; and d) acknowledge in one of their credits that the work was developed by total or partial funding from the SEC/FEC.

To identify publications, a structured search was carried out in MEDLINE (through PubMed) and EMBASE (through Ovid) in July 2017, which was supplemented by a search during the first week of October 2017 to check whether any other work had been published during the development of the project. For the design of the search, a pragmatic approach was adopted that reflected the established inclusion criteria. Thus, a search algorithm was designed that combined using the Boolean operator AND: a) a term related to the principal investigator receiving the funding (delimiting the search to the author list of the publication by means of [au] for the PubMed/MEDLINE search and .au. for the EMBASE search), and b) a term related to the title of the research project included in the competitive process for the grant (delimiting the search to the title of the publication or its title and summary with [ti] or [tiab] for the PubMed/MEDLINE search and .ti. or .ti,ab. for the EMBASE search).

Sometimes more than 1 term was defined for each of the algorithm components (principal investigator AND project title) to boost the scope of the search and thereby identify more candidate documents for inclusion. On these occasions: a) terms related to the principal investigators receiving the funding were added to try to reduce the ambiguity of their names and surnames, applying truncation (*) to compound names or reflecting possible alternatives to the surnames by using the Boolean search operator OR; b) a term was added to the algorithm related to the center of the affiliation of the principal investigator receiving the help (delimiting the search to the affiliation fields of the references with [ad] for the search in PubMed/MEDLINE) or the institution (with .in. for the EMBASE search); and c) terms related to the semantic field of the title were added according to the research project title used during the competitive grant process, in conjunction with the Boolean search operator OR or AND.

The full texts of the publications identified by the search were obtained and their eligibility evaluated according to the previously described criteria. From each of the publications included, the data referring to the unique identifier of the publication in the database were recorded (MEDLINE PMID, variable PUB_ID), its year of publication (variable PUB_ID_YR), and the name of the scientific journal where it was published (variable PUB_ID_JR).

To develop the third specific objective, the impact factors of the journals publishing the identified articles were verified by consulting the publication Journal Citation Reports (through Web of Science) for the year corresponding to the publication of the work. We recorded the data referring to the impact factor of the journal publishing the article (variable PUB_ID_IF), the clinical category for each scientific journal (variable PUB_ID_category), the quartile occupied by the scientific journal in its category (variable PUB_ID_Q), and if the magazine was classified in the first decile of its category (variable PUB_ID_D).

To complete the development of the third specific objective, we verified the number of citations received by the articles identified and their citation in reviews of the biomedical literature and clinical practice guidelines as an indicator of the impact of knowledge transfer and the consideration of the research results as useful information for decision-making. For this reason, each of the included articles was searched for in the Web of Science Core Collection (produced by Clarivate Analytics). The analysis period was selected to allow at least 4 years of follow-up, which is a reasonable time to analyze the fruits of the research.12

Each work was identified in this database by combining terms related to the researcher of interest, the title of the work, and its year of publication. We recorded the data referring to the number of citations received by the work since its publication (variable PUB_ID_WoK), as well as how many of them were reviews of the scientific literature (variable PUB_ID_WoK_reviews) and how many of them were systematic reviews (variable PUB_ID_WoK_SR).

The penetration of the publications derived from the research projects funded was analyzed through a search of citations of the included works registered in Google Scholar, which indicates the impact that a specific publication has had on other academic texts. We searched for the title of each included work and recorded information on the number of direct citations (variable PUB_ID_GoogleScholar) and how many of these were clinical practice guidelines, consensus documents, or position papers (variable PUB_ID_GoogleScholar_Guidelines).

The grants were divided into 4 categories. The first category comprised SEC/FEC grants, including those related to registries. The second category comprised grants awarded by the health care industry. The third category comprised grants for stays in foreign centers, both by the SEC and its various sections. The fourth category comprised grants from the sections and working groups of the SEC.

The amount dedicated to each type of grant per year is shown in Table 1. At the end of the period, the greatest reduction of the grants with respect to their peak occurred for those of the SEC/FEC (–77%), those of the biomedical industry (–60%), and those given for training abroad (–35%), whereas those granted by the different sections remained stable.

The sexes of the principal investigators awarded grants according to grant type are shown in Table 2. Women, who on average comprised 37%, received more grants to study abroad (44%) and fewer directly from the SEC/FEC (27%).

The distribution of the grants awarded by autonomous community is shown in Table 3. Extremadura and the autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla did not receive any assistance from the SEC/FEC for projects. In the rest of the communities, the distribution was highly variable: Catalonia (75 grants, 35% of the total amount) and the Community of Madrid (63 grants, 28% of the total amount) received the highest number of grants and the highest amounts, followed at a great distance by the Valencian Community (20 grants, 7.5%) and Andalusia (16 grants, 6%).

A total of 122 publications derived from 88 research projects financed by SEC/FEC grants in the 2007 to 2012 period were identified, indicating that 37% of the 235 projects financed resulted in a publication. Several authors who had received different grants participated in 6 of these publications, so that 116 unique publications were counted as a result of these research projects (0.49 publications per project).

Although most projects (n=93; 76%) resulted in only 1 publication, a number of research projects (n=29; 24%) produced 2 or more: 25 projects with 2 publications, 3 projects with 3, and 1 project with 4.

The time between the awarding of the funding and the publication of the results varied, with an average of 3.6 years and a median of 3 (range, 1-8 years). The publications registered were from 2007 to 2017.

Of all publications, 101 were made in indexed journals. Two-thirds of these publications (n=66) were concentrated in the clinical category “Cardiac & Cardiovascular Systems”, the most obvious category for the results of the funded projects, given their subject matters (Table 4). The other publications (n=35) corresponded to clinical categories such as vascular diseases, neurology, transplantation medicine, and endocrinology. Finally, the other publications were distributed in a variety of medical categories or in more specific categories such as genetics, physiology, pharmacology, or other multidisciplinary sciences.

Notably, 20% of articles in its category were published in Revista Española de Cardiología, although a number of projects also managed to publish their results in internationally renowned journals (eg, J Am Coll Cardiol, Int J Cardiol, and Eur Heart J).

The impact of the work can be deduced by the publication of half of the articles in journals of the first quartile of their specialty (80% were published in journals in the first 2 quartiles). This trend is consistent over time. In addition, 2 out of every 10 studies were published in a journal situated in the first decile of the specialty.

Until October 2017, the 122 publications considered had received 2258 citations in subsequent studies in the Web of Science, with a mean of 18.51 citations and a median of 8 per study (Table 5). The number of publications in Google Scholar was 3713, with an average of 30.45 citations and a median of 14 per study. These data indicate that the research conducted was able to establish the basis or background for future research or was taken into account for the development of decision-making tools.

A quarter of the citations received by the evaluated publications were from reviews of the scientific literature and 41 of the studies (34%) were included in systematic reviews. Equally remarkable is the inclusion of the evaluated publications in the preparation of 39 clinical guidelines, consensus documents, or position papers. In the period analyzed, 426 489 impact factor points were obtained (average, 5017), with a cost of €9037.28 per impact factor point. The average cost per citation was €1707 for the Web of Science and €1037 for Google Scholar.