We’re excited to announce the launch of Linked Discoveries™, a new experimental pilot resource developed by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) that helps researchers, clinicians, information specialists, and the public discover meaningful connections between related scientific publications. Starting from a PubMed® citation, Linked Discoveries maps up to 200 of the closest related articles so you can quickly explore relationships and shared topics between articles, including conditions, genes, and chemicals of interest.

Every day, researchers face an ever-growing volume of biomedical literature. Finding the right papers isn’t just about matching keywords — it’s about understanding how ideas connect, how findings build on one another, and how research evolves as new evidence emerges. Linked Discoveries was designed to support that kind of exploration: helping users navigate the literature, synthesize what’s known, and evaluate the strength of the evidence behind a finding.

Linked Discoveries analyzes titles, abstracts, and keywords from PubMed citations to generate a “neighborhood” of related articles around a given source article (called a “seed”). Starting from a PubMed record, you can use Linked Discoveries to instantly see and explore papers closely related to it, including:

• Investigate shared topics: Linked Discoveries surfaces shared topics by connecting over 29 million PubMed citations to related resources across NCBI databases. Narrow a neighborhood using filters for conditions, genes, or chemicals. Filters support both “any” (OR) and “all” (AND) logic, so a clinician looking into a specific drug can apply a single chemical filter, whereas a researcher validating a specific hypothesis can look at co-occurrence of multiple topics.
• Spot key article types at a glance: Review articles are flagged directly in the neighborhood display, so you can quickly find high-level overviews to get up to speed or identify retractions that affect how you interpret the surrounding literature. Publications resulting from NIH funding and retracted papers are also directly indicated in the display.
• Explore citation relationships: See which papers in a neighborhood cite each other to understand how publications build on one another’s findings.
• Examine patterns of research activity: Use the timeline view to see how a line of work develops over time and how a paper fits in the historical context.
• Bridge back to PubMed: Continue exploration through your personal workflow by exporting filtered views as comma-separated values (CSVs) or handing them off directly to PubMed’s own tools for deeper follow-up.

Replication and reproducibility are foundational to NIH’s research mission, and Linked Discoveries aims to support those values through the process of literature exploration. By giving users the tools to not only find relevant papers but to critically evaluate the evidence landscape around them, such as by surfacing relationships, connecting findings to their broader scientific context, and flagging retractions, Linked Discoveries makes it easier to assess the evidence that may inform future research. Rather than treating the published literature as a static collection of facts, Linked Discoveries encourages dynamic and discerning engagement with it. In this way, Linked Discoveries supports not only discovery, but also evaluation and critical assessment of research.

Linked Discoveries is a new prototype resource under active refinement, with ongoing exploration of new features and capabilities planned for future releases.

We invite you to try Linked Discoveries, explore a topic of interest to you, and share your thoughts using the Feedback button on any Linked Discoveries page. Your feedback will help us shape where this pilot goes next!