Citation algorithms for identifying research milestones driving biomedical innovation

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 in J Investig Dermatol 134(e1):E18–E22, 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.