# Frontier

> A free, live index of the latest scientific discoveries and breakthroughs, each scored 0-100 on evidence, impact, and novelty, with every score sourced.

Frontier is a science-backed, evidence-scored public index of breakthrough research and technology. Every entry carries a transparent Frontier Score from 0 to 100, and every score decomposes to the sources behind it.

## The Frontier Score
The composite is: integrity x frontier recency x (0.25 x Evidence + 0.25 x Impact + 0.50 x Novelty).
- Evidence (25% of composite): How established and verifiable the result is.
- Impact (25% of composite): How much the result matters, judged field-relative and by current momentum.
- Novelty (50% of composite): How genuinely new the result is, and how fast-moving.
A frontier-recency multiplier discounts a result's standing as it settles into established practice (full when new; the part above a floor of 0.5 halves every 8 months, so it never falls below 0.5), so the active edge stays on top. A retraction collapses the score to zero. Confidence (Settled, Firming up, or Early signal) is reported separately from the score, so novelty is never mistaken for certainty.

Impact is anchored on field-relative measures (field-weighted citation impact, the field-and-year percentile and, for biomedicine, the NIH iCite Relative Citation Ratio), together with citations in the last twelve months and influential citations; a work's total citation count is not used. Data is cross-checked across up to thirteen independent public sources (OpenAlex, Crossref, Semantic Scholar, OpenCitations, Europe PMC, NIH iCite, Unpaywall, DataCite, arXiv, Wikipedia, Hacker News, ClinicalTrials.gov, NIH RePORTER), and each score is re-checked against those sources on a weekly cadence. New work enters the index daily.

The method builds on established measures: field normalization uses OpenAlex FWCI and the NIH iCite Relative Citation Ratio (Hutchins et al., PLoS Biology 2016), and the conceptual-novelty signal adapts the atypical-combination idea of Uzzi, Mukherjee, Stringer and Jones (Science, 2013) to the research topics OpenAlex assigns each work. Frontier's contribution is a transparent, decomposable way of combining these established, peer-reviewed metrics, with every score traceable to its primary records.

## Key pages
- [The Frontier Index](/breakthroughs): the full searchable, sortable, filterable catalog.
- [Methodology](/methodology): the exact scoring recipe, tiers, and honest limitations.
- [Sources](/sources): the thirteen data sources, what each contributes, and live coverage.
- [Feed](/feed.xml): RSS, every scored entry as a post (newest first) with its score, editorial and a direct link to the paper.
- [API](/api/frontier): open JSON API over the whole index (search, filter by field, one entry with its full score breakdown).
- MCP server (/api/mcp): the index as tools for AI assistants over Streamable HTTP, no key needed: search_breakthroughs, latest_breakthroughs, get_breakthrough, list_fields, explain_frontier_score. Listed on the Official MCP Registry as co.frontierresearch/frontier.
- [Fields](/fields)
- [About](/about)