From RRID to Resource Watch: A Knowledgebase of Biomedical Research Resources

Project Summary
Research Resource Identifiers, RRIDs, are persistent identifiers for key research resources such as antibodies,
cell lines, organisms and digital assets. They are in use in over 1300 biomedical journals and are supplied by
authors to uniquely identify which resources are used within a study. The RRID project was launched as a grass-
roots effort in 2014 to improve the identifiability of research resources in the biomedical literature. RRIDs depend
on the collaboration of journals with comprehensive registries and stock centers, which provide an authoritative
identifier for each resource type. The introduction of RRIDs has had a significant impact on our ability to identify
and track the use of research resources in the biomedical literature. Papers that use RRIDs have improved
identifiability of resources from <50% to >90%. RRIDs make it easier to track usage, assign credit, and aggregate
information about how resources perform in the literature. Towards that end, we have assembled a curated
knowledge base that provides information on RRID use in the literature. Because RRIDs are served from a
central database which is used broadly by scientists as they write their papers, the portal can also serve as a
central hub for disseminating critical information about how such reagents perform. For example, the RRID portal
provides warnings on contaminated cell lines provided by Cellosaurus. However, such information on other types
of resources is much more dispersed. Therefore, we built a related knowledge base, Resource Watch, that
enhances the information about RRIDs. The RRID project has been bootstrapped on top of existing NIH-funded
projects, but given its growth and importance to biomedicine, we seek to unify the current RRID project into a
self-supporting entity.

Grant Number: 5R24GM144308-04
NIH Institute/Center: NIH
Principal Investigator: Anita Bandrowski