Explore the data yourself! Our interactive dashboard lets you see the interconnected network of biobanks:

biobanks.pythonanywhere.com

Traditional metrics fail to capture biobanks' true impact. We created a comprehensive Biobank Impact Factor (bIF) to measure influence across research, funding, patents, clinical trials, and public policy.

What makes biobanks successful? Our data shows it's not just size. The most impactful biobanks are:

1) More open to external researchers
2) Offer quality linked medical records
3) Provide advanced genetic data
4) Led by highly cited researchers

🔍 Key finding: 41.1% of papers using biobank data don't properly cite them! Yet 59.6% include a biobank member as coauthor. This suggests collaboration, not citation, drives biobank recognition - creating a "hidden citation" problem that undervalues their true impact.

We identified 2,663 biobanks worldwide and analyzed their footprint across 228,761 scientific articles, 16,210 grants, 15,469 patents, and more. Surprisingly, we found biobank research concentrates heavily on just a few diseases: obesity, Alzheimer's, breast cancer, and diabetes.

But the uptake of American-style quotations after 2022 is not equal across fields, with huge jumps in social sciences and law studies and more moderate increases in life sciences and mathematics.

After 2022, British-style quotations seem to have lost the battle. They are in decline: from being the preferred style in 16.4% of quotations in 2021, they are used in only 10.1% in 2025.