Quantifying the Impact of Biobanks and Cohort Studies

TL;DR

This study computationally analyzes 2,663 biobanks across various scientific outputs to understand their impact, focusing on collaboration, openness, and data quality, and provides insights to optimize their scientific and societal value.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive, data-driven characterization of biobanks' impact, highlighting factors like openness and data quality that influence their scientific and societal contributions.

Findings

Research is concentrated on a few diseases like obesity and Alzheimer's.

Collaboration, not citation count, influences biobank recognition.

Impact correlates with openness and high-quality linked medical data.

Abstract

Biobanks advance biomedical and clinical research by collecting and offering data and biological samples for numerous studies. However, the impact of these repositories varies greatly due to differences in their purpose, scope, governance, and data collected. Here, we computationally identified 2,663 biobanks and their textual mentions in 228,761 scientific articles, 16,210 grants, 15,469 patents, 1,769 clinical trials, and 9,468 public policy documents, helping characterize the academic communities that utilize and support them. We found a strong concentration of biobank-related research on a few diseases, where 20\% of publications focus on obesity, Alzheimer's disease, breast cancer, and diabetes. Moreover, collaboration, rather than citation count, shapes the community's recognition of a biobank. We show that, on average, 41.1\% of articles miss to reference any of the biobank's reference papers and 59.6\% include a biobank member as a co-author. Using a generalized linear model, we identified the key factors that contribute to the impact of a biobank, finding that an impactful biobank tends to be more open to external researchers, and that quality data -- especially linked medical records -- as opposed to large data, correlates with a higher impact in science, innovation, and disease. The collected data and findings are accessible through an open-access web application intended to inform strategies to expand access and maximize the value of these valuable resources.