How the Impact Score works
The Impact Score is a single number that estimates a trial’s scientific attention relative to its peers— how much the research world is publishing about it, writing about it, and acting on it. It is built only from public data, and there is no black box: every input is listed below.
then ranked within trials of the same condition & phase.
Anatomy of the score
Publication impact
Papers linked to the trial, each weighted by journal quality (impact factor), citation count, and recency. The weighting is logarithmic, so a single landmark paper in a top journal counts heavily without a thousand citations swamping everything else. A posted set of primary results is the strongest single signal.
PubMed · Europe PMC · OpenAlex · conference abstracts (ASCO, AACR)
News & press
Coverage in the biotech and medical trade press over the last two years, tiered by source authority — a STAT or Endpoints story counts more than a newswire reprint — and decayed over roughly a two-month half-life so the signal reflects what is being discussed now.
Curated feeds: STAT, Endpoints, Fierce Biotech, BioSpace, BioPharma Dive, and others
Trial activity
A trial that has completed or is actively running (with data on the way) carries more weight than one that has not started. Suspended, terminated, and withdrawn trials are suppressed entirely — they do not rank.
ClinicalTrials.gov · EU CTIS registry status & results postings
Normalized to peers
Raw signal is not compared across the whole database — a first-in-human study in a rare disease would never out-publish a Phase 3 oncology program. Instead, each trial is ranked within its own cohort of the same condition and phase. A “19” means a trial stands out among trials like it, which is the comparison a professional actually cares about.
How to read it
The scale runs gray → blue; darker is higher. Most trials — especially newly-recruiting ones with no publications yet — score low or show a dash. That is expected, and honest: the score reflects realized attention, not potential.
What it is not
- × Not a judgment of a trial’s scientific quality, safety, or rigor.
- × Not clinical or investment advice, and not an endorsement.
- × Not a measure of future promise — a low score often just means “too early.”
It is one thing only: a transparent, peer-normalized read on how much published and reported attention a trial has earned from public sources.
The Investigator Score
We are extending the same idea to people: an investigator’s score rolls up the Impact Scores of the trials they lead, separated into all-time, current, and emergingleaders. Same principle, same transparency — built on what an investigator has actually done, not citation counts.