Introducing BenchSignal

Analyzing Science through the Lens of Instruments

With Alex, I’m excited to introduce BenchSignal—a dataset tracking scientific instrument usage across millions of peer-reviewed papers.

We scanned OpenAlex, a repository of every open-access scientific article, and extracted the instruments mentioned in each one. We now have XX million papers with YY instrument mentions indexed, and the dataset grows daily.

Why build this? Over the past several months, I’ve developed two key convictions:

• the development of scientific instruments is an understudied lens for understanding scientific progress

• scientific instrumentation is a $500B industry waiting for disruption

With BenchSignal, we can identify vendor market share for different instruments in excquisite detail:

We can also identify which instrument modalities are growing in adoption. For instance, we can see the skyrocketing growth of Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy (STEM) over more mature Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) and Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM).

We can also break out papers by country and identify where vendors have differentiated market access. For instance, Chinese researchers are more likely to use Japanese Transmission Electron Microscopes from JEOL, rather than U.S.-based Thermo Fisher.

We’re also expanding the dataset to include more granular institution-level tracking of higher-end instruments, along with citation-weighted metrics for both instruments and vendors. I won't be posting BenchSignal updates here, you can follow BenchSignal on Linkedin.

If you’re interested in commercial or academic applications for this data, reach out.