US Physician Researchers: Papers, Trials and Industry Payments

About this dataset

What’s in the listing

Drug and device companies report their payments to US doctors to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), which publishes them as Open Payments. This listing links the doctors in those records to the research papers they publish, from OpenAlex, the open catalog of 476 million research papers and their authors, and to the clinical trials they lead, from ClinicalTrials.gov. The three sources share no common ID, so Civly matches them.

Three tables. RESEARCHERS has one row per doctor, keyed by NPI, with specialty, practice city and state, paper count, citations and h-index, research subjects, research employers by year, trial counts, the general industry payments the doctor received and the research payments that name the doctor as a lead investigator. PAPERS has every paper on the doctor’s matched research profiles: title, year, journal, citations, retraction flag, funders and award numbers, and author position. TRIALS has every trial tied to the doctor, with how the link was made, the industry research money tied to that trial, and the trial’s title, phase, status, conditions, sponsor and dates.

Common uses: finding the doctors who publish and run trials in a therapy area and what industry already pays them, building medical-affairs and sales target lists of research-active doctors by specialty and state, seeing which paid doctors lead which industry trials and the research money tied to each, and finding paid doctors with retracted papers.

Coverage

How much is in each table

Row counts as of October 9, 2026.

Accuracy

How the matching checks out

Every link between a doctor and a paper or trial is a match Civly made, because the three sources share no common ID. A doctor is matched to OpenAlex researcher profiles by first and last name, a US research employer in the doctor’s state, and how well the papers’ subjects fit the doctor’s specialty. PAPER_MATCH_CONFIDENCE records the result.

High (176,417 doctors): a research employer in the doctor’s practice city plus a good subject fit on one profile. Of 130 high matches checked by hand, 121 were fully correct and 123 had the right doctor (2 of those also carried a same-name researcher’s papers). 1 was matched to a different researcher with the same name, and 6 could not be confirmed either way.

Medium (75,010 doctors): a research employer only in the doctor’s state, or a weaker subject fit. In a hand check of 26 doctors, about 4 in 5 were clearly right.

Lower-confidence matches are left out. A doctor without a high or medium match has no papers here and is in the table only through a trial link. Very common names are matched only with strong evidence, so coverage is uneven by name origin. A doctor’s matched profiles can occasionally include a same-name researcher’s papers. OPENALEX_RESEARCHER_ID in PAPERS shows which profile each paper came from.

Trial links are made two ways (LINK_METHOD). A payment record link is exact: an Open Payments research payment names the doctor’s NPI and the trial’s ClinicalTrials.gov number. A registry name link matches a lead investigator listed in ClinicalTrials.gov to a doctor by name and state. Checked against 1,179 investigators already tied to their trials by payment records, the registry name match found 628 of them, linked none to the wrong doctor, and missed the other 551.

Schemas

Data dictionary

Three tables, 71 columns in total: RESEARCHERS, PAPERS and TRIALS. The same tables serve the trial and the subscription. During the free trial they return every doctor whose practice state is Massachusetts (STATE = 'MA'), with those doctors’ rows in PAPERS and TRIALS. A subscription adds every other state.

Schema

Data dictionary: RESEARCHERS

One row per doctor, keyed by NPI: name, specialty and practice location from Open Payments, the paper match and a summary of the matched research profiles, trial counts, and industry payments. 31 columns. Dollar columns are in US dollars.

Schema

Data dictionary: PAPERS

One row per doctor per paper on the doctor’s matched OpenAlex profiles: title, year, journal, citations, retraction flag, funders and award numbers, and the doctor’s author position. 18 columns.

Schema

Data dictionary: TRIALS

One row per doctor per clinical trial tied to the doctor: how the link was made, the industry research money tied to the trial, and the trial’s title, phase, status, conditions, sponsor and dates as ClinicalTrials.gov publishes them. 22 columns. Dollar columns are in US dollars.

Matching

Joining the tables

NPI joins all three tables. RESEARCHERS has one row per NPI. PAPERS has one row per NPI and OPENALEX_PAPER_ID, and TRIALS one row per NPI and NCT_ID. PAPERS.OPENALEX_RESEARCHER_ID is one of the IDs listed in RESEARCHERS.OPENALEX_RESEARCHER_IDS. NPI also joins to other NPI-keyed data, such as the US Physician Payments listing’s COVERED_RECIPIENT_NPI. NCT_ID is the ClinicalTrials.gov number and DOI the paper’s DOI, for matching to other trial and publication data.

Getting started

Sample queries

After installing, set your worksheet’s database selector to the installed database and these run as written.

-- Most-cited cardiologists in a state, with industry payments
SELECT npi, first_name, last_name, city, specialty, paper_count, citations, h_index,
       trial_count, general_payments_usd, paper_match_confidence
FROM US_PHYSICIAN_RESEARCHERS.RESEARCHERS
WHERE state = 'MA' AND specialty ILIKE '%Cardiovascular%' AND paper_match_confidence = 'high'
ORDER BY h_index DESC
LIMIT 50;

-- Doctors leading a sponsor's trials
SELECT t.lead_sponsor_name, t.nct_id, t.brief_title, t.phases, t.overall_status,
       r.first_name, r.last_name, r.city, r.state, t.link_method, t.industry_research_usd
FROM US_PHYSICIAN_RESEARCHERS.TRIALS t
JOIN US_PHYSICIAN_RESEARCHERS.RESEARCHERS r USING (npi)
WHERE t.lead_sponsor_name ILIKE '%Boston Scientific%'
ORDER BY t.start_date DESC;

-- Paid doctors with retracted papers
SELECT r.npi, r.first_name, r.last_name, r.state, r.specialty, COUNT(*) AS retracted_papers
FROM US_PHYSICIAN_RESEARCHERS.PAPERS p
JOIN US_PHYSICIAN_RESEARCHERS.RESEARCHERS r USING (npi)
WHERE p.is_retracted
GROUP BY ALL
ORDER BY retracted_papers DESC;

Provenance

Sourcing and attribution

Sources: CMS Open Payments, published by the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, OpenAlex, from OurResearch, and ClinicalTrials.gov, run by the U.S. National Library of Medicine. Open Payments is public data. OpenAlex is released under CC0 and needs no attribution. Civly credits OpenAlex and OurResearch as a courtesy. ClinicalTrials.gov makes its data available at no charge and asks redistributors to credit ClinicalTrials.gov and say what they changed: Civly matched lead investigators to doctors and passes trial fields through as published.

What Civly did: matched each doctor in Open Payments to OpenAlex researcher profiles and to ClinicalTrials.gov trials, and totaled each doctor’s payments. The matches, PAPER_MATCH_CONFIDENCE, PAPER_MATCH_LEVEL, LINK_METHOD, REGISTRY_MATCH_LEVEL, the trial counts and the payment totals are Civly’s work. Paper details are OpenAlex’s and trial details are ClinicalTrials.gov’s. When you publish analysis based on this dataset, credit CMS Open Payments, OpenAlex and ClinicalTrials.gov as sources and Civly as compiler.

Doctors’ names, NPIs, specialties and practice cities are public professional records. The listing has no home addresses, phone numbers or email addresses.

This product is not endorsed by CMS, the National Library of Medicine or OurResearch.

Permitted use: not for employment, credentialing, credit, insurance or tenant decisions about a person.

For coverage or access questions: matthew@civly.ai