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Introduction: National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants are an essential funding source for cardiothoracic (CT) surgeon-scientists. The association between NIH funding and an article’s research impact, however, has not been explored. We hypothesized that CT surgery research articles supported by NIH funding exhibit enhanced scholarly impact. Methods: Research records and NIH funding history for all CT surgery faculty (n=992) at accredited United States CT surgery training institutions in 2018 were obtained using Scopus and Grantome, respectively. Using the NIH iCite database, all articles published by these surgeons were classified as either basic science research (BSR, iCite animal or molecular/cellular score >0) or clinical research (CR, iCite animal and molecular/cellular score = 0). The relative citation ratio (RCR), an NIH-validated field-normalized metric of scholarly impact, was calculated for each article, where RCR 1.00 indicates equal impact as other NIH-funded articles in the same field, and RCR 2.00 indicates twice the impact. Data are presented as median [interquartile range] and analyzed using the Mann-Whitney test. Results: A total of 37,402 unique articles were identified, including 9,469 supported by NIH funding and 27,933 without NIH funding. CT surgery research articles with NIH funding exhibit a significantly greater median RCR than those without NIH funding (1.08 [0.53-2.19] vs 0.75 [0.28-1.72], p Conclusions: At single-article resolution, CT surgery research publications supported by NIH grant funding exhibit enhanced scholarly impact and compare favorably in median RCR versus other NIH-funded biomedical research.