Citation algorithms for identifying research milestones driving biomedical innovation

Abstract

Scientific activity plays a major role in innovation for biomedicine and healthcare. For instance, fundamental research on disease pathologies and mechanisms can generate potential targets for drug therapy. This co-evolution is punctuated by papers which provide new perspectives and open new domains. Despite the relationship between scientific discovery and biomedical advancement, identifying these research milestones that truly impact biomedical innovation can be difficult and is largely based solely on the opinions of subject matter experts. Here, we consider whether a new class of citation algorithms that identify seminal scientific works in a field, Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy (RPYS) and multi-RPYS, can identify the connections between innovation (e.g., therapeutic treatments) and the foundational research underlying them. Specifically, we assess whether the results of these analytic techniques converge with expert opinions on research milestones driving biomedical innovation in the treatment of Basal Cell Carcinoma. Our results show that these algorithms successfully identify the majority of milestone papers detailed by experts (Wong and Dlugosz 2014) - thereby validating the power of these algorithms to converge on independent opinions of seminal scientific works derived by subject matter experts. These advances offer an opportunity to identify scientific activities enabling innovation in biomedicine.

Influential cited references in FEMS Microbiology Letters: lessons from Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy (RPYS)

“…The comparison showed that the expert view discovered similar historical roots as the RPYS. A similar result has been presented by Comins and Leydesdorff (2017). They assessed whether the results of RPYS ‘converge with expert opinions on research milestones driving biomedical innovation in the treatment of Basal Cell Carcinoma.…”

Data-Mining the Foundational Patents of Photovoltaic Materials: An Application of Patent Citation Spectroscopy

“…We used Patent Citation Spectroscopy-originally developed as Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy for studying landmarks and milestones in scientific literature (Comins & Leydesdorff, 2017;Thor, Marx, Leydesdorff, & Bornmann, 2016)-to patent literature classified into the nine Y-subclasses of CPC that describe material photovoltaic technologies. In five of the nine cases, we found corroborating evidence for the foundational character of the patent indicated by the routine.…”

Identifying Scientific and Technical “Unicorns”

“…While citation analysis penetrates different disciplines, such as economics and management (Laengle et al, 2017;Merigo & Yang, 2017), sociology (Moed, Luwei, & Nederhof, 2002;White, Boell, & Yu, 2009;White, 2015), and biomedicine (Bornmann & Daniel, 2006;Comins & Leydesdorff, 2017;Garfield, 1991), highlycited analysis shows its unique advantages to generate interesting and meaningful exploration in different discipline areas, where we mention that Bornmann and Leydesdorff (2015) did research in the domain of top-cited papers to investigate the development of the BRICS countries and scientific excellence.…”