Linked Discoveries: Jay Bhattacharya's PubMed Replication Tool
Advancing
On September 24, 2026, NIH’s National Library of Medicine launched Linked Discoveries, an experimental PubMed tool covering more than 29 million publications that lets users explore a “neighborhood” of related publications around a citation — including replication studies. NIH describes the tool as an early product of the agency-wide replication and reproducibility initiative championed by Director Jay Bhattacharya.
Bhattacharya said the tool was “designed to support” understanding “how ideas connect, how findings build on one another, and how research evolves as new evidence emerges.” In practice, the tool is meant to surface replication work that is otherwise hard to find: a reader looking at a paper could see, nearby, studies that attempted to confirm or challenge its findings.
Linked Discoveries sits inside Bhattacharya’s broader replication agenda — the $174 million R3PEATS program, an NIH journal for replication studies, and his call to shift science’s “standard of truth” from top-journal publication to operational replication success. NIH positioned the tool as experimental, meaning its interface and coverage are expected to evolve as the agency gathers user feedback.
Timeline
- September 24, 2026: The National Library of Medicine launches Linked Discoveries as an experimental PubMed tool covering 29M+ publications, described as an early product of the NIH replication and reproducibility initiative.
