Identifying Transformative Research in Biomedical Sciences

Transformative research refers to research that shifts or disrupts established scientific paradigms. Identifying potential transformative research early and accurately is important for funding agencies and policy makers to maximize the impact of their investment. It also helps scientists identify and focus their attention on promising emerging works and thus improve their productivity. This paper will describe a systematic approach to address this need. We will focus on biomedical sciences for its highest impact. Our key idea is that transformative research creates an observable disruption in the structure of information cascades, the chains of citations that can be traced back to the papers establishing some scientific paradigm, which measure the attention the scientific community pays to this paradigm. Therefore, a disruption occurs when the challenger shifts the attention of the community away from the established paradigm. Our experimental results show that such a disruption is visible soon after the challenger’s introduction.

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