DeepAI AI Chat
Log In Sign Up

Banana for scale: Gauging trends in academic interest by normalising publication rates to common and innocuous keywords

02/12/2021
by   Edwin S. Dalmaijer, et al.
0

Many academics use yearly publication numbers to quantify academic interest for their research topic. While such visualisations are ubiquitous in grant applications, manuscript introductions, and review articles, they fail to account for the rapid growth in scientific publications. As a result, any search term will likely show an increase in supposed "academic interest". One proposed solution is to normalise yearly publication rates by field size, but this is arduous and difficult. Here, we propose an simpler index that normalises keywords of interest by a ubiquitous and innocuous keyword, such as "banana". Alternatively, one could opt for field-specific keywords or hierarchical structures (e.g. PubMed's Medical Subject Headings, MeSH) to compute "interest market share". Using this approach, we uncovered plausible trends in academic interest in examples from the medical literature. In neuroimaging, we found that not the supplementary motor area (as was previously claimed), but the prefrontal cortex is the most interesting part of the brain. In cancer research, we found a contemporary preference for cancers with high prevalence and clinical severity, and notable declines in interest for more treatable or likely benign neoplasms. Finally, we found that interest in respiratory viral infections spiked when strains showed potential for pandemic involvement, with SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 pandemic being the most extreme example. In sum, the time is ripe for a quick and easy method to quantify trends in academic interest for anecdotal purposes. We provide such a method, along with software for researchers looking to implement it in their own writing.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

05/13/2020

MeSH descriptors indicate the knowledge growth in the SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 pandemic

The scientific papers dealing with the novel betacoronavirus SARS-CoV-2 ...
05/04/2017

Measurement of authorship by publications: a normative approach

Administrators in all academic organizations across the world have to de...
01/13/2023

Trends in Explainable AI (XAI) Literature

The XAI literature is decentralized, both in terminology and in publicat...
07/06/2022

The History of AI Rights Research

This report documents the history of research on AI rights and other mor...
04/12/2021

Breaking Community Boundary: Comparing Academic and Social Communication Preferences regarding Global Pandemics

The global spread of COVID-19 has caused pandemics to be widely discusse...
04/18/2022

Strengthening Subcommunities: Towards Sustainable Growth in AI Research

AI's rapid growth has been felt acutely by scholarly venues, leading to ...
09/07/2022

An Assessment Tool for Academic Research Managers in the Third World

The academic evaluation of the publication record of researchers is rele...