DALLAS – Aug. 9, 2017 – UT Southwestern Medical Center ranks fifth in the world in the number of published research articles cited as significant sources in third-party patent applications. This new measurement is a way to evaluate an institution’s impact and influence on industrial innovation – how a scientific discovery leads to, or plays a part in, the development and commercialization of new products and services.

By tracking the path from discovery to commercial product, this metric could help institutions better evaluate the return on research investments. The Normalized Lens Influence Metric, created by The Lens, will be published in a Nature Index 2017 Innovation supplement to the Aug. 10 print edition of Nature.

The Scripps Research Institute in San Diego and Rockefeller University in New York ranked first and second in the metric, followed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and UT Southwestern. Rounding out the top 10 were the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, the National Institutes of Health, the University of California San Francisco, Stanford University, and Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Nature and Nature Index are subsidiaries of Nature Research, owned by Springer Nature. Launched in 2014, the Nature Index database tracks author affiliations of research articles published in 68 natural science journals.

The Lens is a public resource that provides open source databases of patents and software to search the databases. 

About UT Southwestern Medical Center

UT Southwestern, one of the premier academic medical centers in the nation, integrates pioneering biomedical research with exceptional clinical care and education. The institution’s faculty has received six Nobel Prizes, and includes 22 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 18 members of the National Academy of Medicine, and 14 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators. The faculty of more than 2,700 is responsible for groundbreaking medical advances and is committed to translating science-driven research quickly to new clinical treatments. UT Southwestern physicians provide care in about 80 specialties to more than 100,000 hospitalized patients, 600,000 emergency room cases, and oversee approximately 2.2 million outpatient visits a year.