Is it possible for a research article to be informative and ground breaking without referencing any other work?
I know of exactly one peer-reviewed research paper with no references at all.


  Mark H. Overmars and Emo Welzl. The complexity of cutting paper.  Proceedings of the [First Annual] Symposium on Computational Geometry, 316–321, 1985.


Here is a screenshot of the references section:



According to Google Scholar, this paper has been cited 29 times.

So yes, it is possible, for the right value of "ground-breaking", but extremely rare.