The US National Institutes of Health has launched Linked Discoveries, an experimental tool that helps scientists see how an individual research finding connects to the wider body of biomedical evidence.

Built by the National Library of Medicine, the tool covers more than 29 million PubMed publications. From any citation, users can explore a ‘neighbourhood’ of closely related papers, including replication studies, through graph and timeline views. Results can be filtered by conditions, genes and chemicals, and show citation links, retractions and reviews.

The launch is part of an NIH-wide push to strengthen replication and reproducibility in funded research. NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya said the tool addresses the difficulty of seeing how a finding fits within existing evidence when studies are scattered across resources.

The agency cautions that the tool does not judge research quality or confirm whether a replication succeeded. It organises the material so researchers can make that assessment themselves, and will be refined based on user feedback.