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Insights from biomedical citation networks can be used to identify promising avenues for accelerating research and its downstream bench-to-bedside translation. Citation analysis generally assumes that each citation documents causal knowledge transfer that informed the conception, design, or execution of the main experiments. Citations may exist for other reasons. In this paper we identify a subset of citations that are unlikely to represent causal knowledge flow. Using a large, comprehensive feature set of open access data, we train a predictive model to identify such citations. The model relies only on the title, abstract, and reference set and not the full-text or future citations patterns, making it suitable for publications as soon as they are released, or those behind a paywall (the vast majority). We find that the model identifies, with high prediction scores, citations that were likely added during the peer review process, and conversely identifies with low prediction scores citations that are known to represent causal knowledge transfer. Using the model, we find that federally funded biomedical research publications represent 30% of the estimated causal knowledge transfer from basic studies to clinical research, even though these comprise only 10% of the literature, a three-fold overrepresentation in this important type of knowledge transfer. This finding underscores the importance of federal funding as a policy lever to improve human health.

Significance statement

Citation networks document knowledge flow across the literature, and insights from these networks are increasingly used to form science policy decisions. However, many citations are known to be not causally related to the inception, design, and execution of the citing study. This adds noise to the insights derived from these networks. Here, we show that it is possible to train a machine learning model to identify such citations, and that the model learns to identify known causal citations as well. We use this model to show that government funding drives a disproportionate amount of causal knowledge transfer from basic to clinical research. This result highlights a straightforward policy lever for accelerating improvements to human health: federal funding.