Methodology

PRI ranks the most-cited original research papers within defined life-science fields and publication years. This page describes the methodology used when production rankings are published.

Data source

Rankings are derived from OpenAlex bibliographic and citation metadata. The current demo page uses mock seed data while the content pipeline is under development.

Eligibility

Original research articles are included. Reviews are excluded unless explicitly noted. Self-citations are excluded from counts. Field normalization is applied so cross-subfield citation baselines do not dominate rankings.

Publication window

Each ranking covers papers published between January 1 and December 31 of the stated year. Citation counts are frozen as of a published snapshot date shown on each ranking page.

Updates

PRI releases are annual per field/year. Revisions, if any, will be documented on the ranking page with an updated dateModified in structured data.

License

Downloadable datasets are released under CC BY 4.0. Please cite the PRI ranking URL when reusing data.