Introduction to IRIS

Cherita White, Program Administrator, BSD Office of Research Services

The Illinois Researcher Information Service (IRIS) is a unit of the University of Illinois Library at Urbana-Champaign(UIUC). The IRIS database of funding opportunities has been compiled at UIUC since 1979. It currently contains records on about 6,750 funding opportunities, of which about 2,700 have subject headings of "life sciences" or "medical sciences." Of these, about 1,300 are federal opportunities. The IRIS database is updated regularly and is now available to the entire University of Chicago community at http://carousel.lis.uiuc.edu/~iris/search.html. From there, select "Search IRIS and OPS (subscribers only)," then "IRIS (WWW version)". You now need to choose between the quick and fine-tuned search pages. (You can also reach a help screen from this page.) I almost always choose the fine-tuned page because it can do everything that the quick version can and, of course, a lot more.

There are many searchable fields available on the fine-tuned page, and you can search the database in any way you're likely to need. I have found that almost all funding searches based on a particular investigator's research interests can be done with only the following six fields:

Activities supported --indispensable if looking for postdoctoral opportunities; otherwise I rarely use it

Academic qualifications --this is handy for students searching for funding

Sponsor type ("US Federal Government" and "Other")--helpful for limiting a search (for example, if you're already familiar with federal grant mechanisms)

Subjects/keywords -- I use "Opportunities for Junior Faculty"; otherwise I seldom need this field, and I find the index and thesaurus too cumbersome for frequent use

Keywords or phrases in all fields --without a doubt, the most useful search field; in most cases, whatever you might put in Subjects/keywords will work just as well here

A few other things to keep in mind:

  • Separate multiple search terms in the same field with 'AND','OR', and 'NOT'.
  • There is a Boolean 'AND' relationship between fields; therefore, the more conditions you impose on the search, the fewer results you're going to get back.
  • On Windows machines, you use the 'Ctrl' key to select non-adjacent menu choices. The 'Command' key would serve the same purpose on a Macintosh.
  • IRIS has automatic left- and right-hand truncation. This means that if you want records containing the terms 'cardiology', 'cardiologist', and 'cardiologists', search for 'cardiolog'.

We hope you find IRIS as easy to work with and helpful for your funding search as we have. We would like to know what you think of IRIS once you've given it a try. If, as we expect, you find it to be a valuable tool in the search for research funding, please do not hesitate to continue sending faculty to us for custom searches as well. In addition to IRIS, the Office of Research Services subscribes to a Dialog CD-ROM database that contains biomedical funding opportunities not found on IRIS at present.