Future demand and advancement in medical fields for best allocation of research funding

For a high school competition we were provided with access to altmetric data, and asked to predict the future of science. Based upon this, we shifted our focus to the medical sector, and to the correlation between future demand, and current research. Based on this focus, our goal was to predict which medical sectors will have the greatest need for research funding in the coming years. Our results will aid in the distribution of research funding in order to prepare for increased demand in medical fields that are currently not as prevalent. Using indicators of current research and development rates, as well as indicators of increasing demand in the future, we were able to design an algorithm and corresponding python programs which use three years worth of data to generate where research funds should be directed in the following two to three years. We also used lists of the top one hundred altmetric articles in 2014, 2015 and 2016 to calculate the average Altmetric Attention score, and number of papers in the top one hundred list for a variety of medical fields. Some interesting trends were found in these numbers, such as the major scientific influence viruses have the year after an outbreak.