  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.
