University of Washington's Institute of Translational Health Sciences and its partners--Group Health Research Institute, Duke University and Wayne State University--have developed a new web site to help researchers create and sustain successful multisite research collaborations. The project team created the site, http://researchtoolkit.org, to enhance the efficiency of research from start to finish, including tools for developing research networks, launching and managing projects, and sharing study results and other products such as data sets, tools, and training resources.

Having these resources reside on a single web site is an efficiency measure. "There's no need for researchers and project teams to start from scratch," said Dr. Laura-Mae Baldwin, UW professor of family medicine and co-investigator on the project, known as PRIMER, or Partnership-driven Resources to Improve and Enhance Research.

Researchers are increasingly finding strength in unity. By collaborating with investigators at multiple sites, they can pool data and study larger and more diverse groups of people in various settings. Collaboration also allows researchers to generalize findings to other populations and settings, and offers greater statistical power. This makes it easier to answer questions about which kinds of health care work best to improve the health of Americans. The downside of multisite collaboration is logistical difficulties, which the new web site aims to ease.

"ResearchToolkit.org will enable clinical investigators from multiple institutions to collaborate more efficiently and effectively on health research," said Dr. Barbara Alving, director at the National Center for Research Resources, part of the National Institutes for Health. "Ultimately, this new, web-based resource may help improve community engagement nationwide."

To ensure web site content usefulness, the team surveyed investigators who conduct community-based research, along with other research leaders. As part of the survey, respondents were invited to contribute resources of their own, and identify unmet needs and barriers to doing research efficiently.

"The result is a site built by the researchers, for the researchers," said Sarah Greene, lead investigator and a research associate at Group Health Research Institute.

Programs such as the National Institutes of Health's Clinical and Translational Science Award initiative and its recent Grand Opportunities funding project have spurred substantial growth in multicenter research, said Greene. "This means today's researchers are challenged to quickly surmount the logistical and operational barriers to project development. We built the ResearchToolkit.org site to help them."