While the focus of this document is entry into drug development (i.e. setting the bar) consideration also needs to be given to the research output that feeds both commercial and academic pipelines. To state the obvious, in R&D the success of D is predicated on both the scale and quality of R. This applies at the global level as well as on an institutional and project team basis. As has been pointed out ('Tracking 20 years of compound-to-target output from literature and patents', 2013, PMID 24204758) quantitatively assessing R is difficult because it is not explicitly captured, even by CI sources. However, there are useful surrogates in the form of patents, papers and database entries for what are typically (even if imprecisely) classified as lead compounds. Tracking of patents and papers outputs are shown in Fig. .