Forty-five percent of all federal funds for university research goes directly to the nation's 126 medical schools, according to a report to be released today by the RAND Corporation. States with few or no medical schools are thus at a disadvantage in winning federal funds, the authors of the report found.

Observers of federal financing for university research have long known that universities with medical schools have a leg up in the competition for grants and contracts because of the government's emphasis on research related to health. However, the RAND report describes itself as the first to define the extent of that advantage.

The report, "Vital Assets: Federal Investment in Research and Development at the Nation's Universities and Colleges," was financed by the National Science Foundation. It also tracks trends in other aspects of federal support for academic research, including by institution and by state. Those numbers are more detailed than data published by the NSF itself because the RAND numbers capture actual spending through research grants and contracts, said the report's lead author, Donna L. Fossum, a senior policy analyst at RAND.

She said the report is meant to help colleges and universities compare their receipt of federal research funds against that of their peers and to help them develop plans to build their capacities for conducting research.

The report calls the percentage of money going to medical schools striking because those academic units represent "only a small fraction of the nation's many hundreds of universities and colleges." The report adds that "because some states have no medical schools and others have many, the distribution of federal R&D funds going to the universities and colleges in the various states is considerably skewed."

The six states with no medical schools are Alaska, Delaware, Idaho, Maine, Montana, and Wyoming. When funds for medical schools are ignored, three other states -- Connecticut, Missouri, and Vermont -- slip significantly in the rankings of federal research funds by state for 2002. That's because their medical schools receive relatively large amounts of research dollars, the report says.

Over all, the medical schools got $9.6-billion, or 45 percent, of all academic research funds distributed among nearly 800 institutions in the 2002 fiscal year. That was up slightly over the 2001 level of 42 percent.

The report also notes that, in most states, academic researchers appear to specialize in certain kinds of research financed by certain federal agencies. In only four states did colleges receive significant amounts from all six of the federal agencies that provide the most money for academic research.

And that money can come with a catch: Some agencies, like the Defense Department and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, supply large amounts of research dollars through contracts, not grants. In comparison with grants, contracts give universities less say about how to conduct the research and provide the government ownership of the resulting data or intellectual property.

The report also says that:

Two-thirds of federal funds for academic research in 2002 flowed through the Department of Health and Human Services, the parent agency of the National Institutes of Health.

Historically black colleges and universities received less than a quarter of the federal research funds, on average, that other institutions got.