Historically, scholarly impact has been measured through the citations between research articles. Recent trends in impact metrics, however, have broadened the thinking surrounding what represents a true measure of impact on the broader world. Biomedicine is a field rich in opportunities for non-traditional citations to be used to measure broader impact. A medical breakthrough that starts off as a wet-bench project will subsequently pass through stages of animal and human experimentation during which many of following applied-science-citation types will be generated:
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We will illustrate the power of applied-science citations through a case study on “chimeric antigen receptor” (CAR) T-cell therapy that has given a new lease on life to many cancer patients.