Why the Disruption index cannot identify the most important literature in the field of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis?

The Disruption (D) index is a network-oriented metric that measures the extent to which a specific paper disrupts the existing literature. This study aimed to assess the accuracy of the D index by analyzing a sample of literature on Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). The findings indicated that the D index did not effectively identify the most significant ALS-related literature. As a result, we suggested that bibliometric indicators encounter challenges in accurately assessing the importance of biomedical literature, particularly in the context of drug research and development, which heavily relies on foundational work in the field and cannot be overlooked in references.