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Identifying Transformative Research
in Biomedical Sciences
Yi-Hung Huang
1
,
2
, Ming-Tat Ko
2
, and Chun-Nan Hsu
3
1
Department of Computer Science, National Taiwan University, Taipei 106, Taiwan
2
Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taipei 115, Taiwan
3
Division of Biomedical Informatics, Department of Medicine, UC San Diego, La
Jolla, CA 92093
d98922025@csie.ntu.edu
Abstract.
Transformative research refers to research that shifts or dis-
rupts established scientific paradigms. Identifying potential transforma-
tive 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 system-
atic approach to address this need. We will focus on biomedical sciences
for its highest impact. Our key idea is that transformative research cre-
ates 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 com-
munity pays to this paradigm. Therefore, a disruption occurs when the
challenger shifts the attention of the community away from the estab-
lished paradigm. Our experimental results show that such a disruption
is visible soon after the challenger's introduction.
Keywords:
Citation Analysis, Network Data Analysis, Transformative
Research.
1 Introduction
Transformative research refers to research driven by ideas that lead to emerg-
ing concepts, approaches, and/or new subfields of research that shifts or disrupts
an established scientific paradigm. According to Thomas Kuhn's influential book
titled
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
[1], the progress of science is a non-
incremental process propelled by paradigm shifts. Recently, government funding
in research is under increasing scrutiny. The challenge is how to maximize return
of investment of research budgets. Funding transformative research is generally
agreed as an effective strategy and has been ocially placed at the top priority
of funding decision by National Institute of Health (NIH) and National Sci-
ence Foundation (NSF) [2]. Systematically identifying transformative research
accurately and early is therefore more critical than ever. This also applies to sci-
entists, who need to constantly monitor the most recent transformative research
in related fields to stay competitive in the forefront of their respective fields.
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