Evaluating innovation. Part 1: The concept of progressive scholarly acceptance.

Understanding how the relevant medical community accepts new therapies is vital to patients, physicians, and society. Increasingly, focus is placed on how medical innovations are evaluated. But recognizing when a treatment has become accepted practice-essentially, acceptance by the scientific community-remains a challenge and a barrierto investigating treatment development. This report aims to demonstrate the theory, method, and limitations of a model for measuring a new metric that the authors term "progressive scholarly acceptance." A model was developed to identify when the scientific community has accepted an innovation, by observing when researchers have moved beyond the initial study of efficacy. This model could enable further investigations into the methods and influences of treatment development.