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What the Year’s Most-Noticed Research Papers Tell Us About Ourselves

By  Tom Bartlett
December 10, 2014

Skim the 100 most-discussed research papers of the past year, put together by the London-based company Altmetric, and you’ll see some of the oddball stuff you might expect. One study found that dogs urinate and defecate in alignment with the earth’s magnetic field. In other pee-related news, some scientists, for some reason, measured uric-acid levels in swimming pools and gently suggested that water quality could be improved if more attention were paid to “hygiene habits on the part of swimmers.”

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Skim the 100 most-discussed research papers of the past year, put together by the London-based company Altmetric, and you’ll see some of the oddball stuff you might expect. One study found that dogs urinate and defecate in alignment with the earth’s magnetic field. In other pee-related news, some scientists, for some reason, measured uric-acid levels in swimming pools and gently suggested that water quality could be improved if more attention were paid to “hygiene habits on the part of swimmers.”

Those kinds of papers do get shared on Facebook and Reddit, two of the sites that Altmetric monitors to compile its rankings (go here for a breakdown of the methodology and results). But they’re in the minority. By my unscientific count, only seven of the top 100 fall into the weird/novelty category.

Instead, what’s most intriguing about the list is that it offers a peek into our anxieties and our hopes, our curiosity about where we came from and our wonder at (and fear of) what the future holds.

What we’re most focused on is our health. More than a third of the papers are about diet and disease. If Ebola doesn’t kill us, we’re afraid that milk will. We’re worried that we’re too fat, that our kids are too fat, that sugar might give us heart disease (and that Splenda might give us diabetes). Too much alcohol might cause dementia. Too little vitamin D might cause it, too.

A couple of studies refer to how the flora in our guts affect our health in myriad, not-yet-understood ways. Just a few years ago the word “microbiome” might have seemed exotic; now it’s becoming common parlance.

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We’re anxious about the environment, and for good reason. Marine ice sheets are collapsing. Global forests are shrinking. African elephants are under attack from human beings. In fact, as another paper explains, pretty much all animals are under attack by people, and we may be in the midst of the planet’s sixth mass extinction, with consequences that we don’t yet completely comprehend. (It’s fair to assume they won’t be good.)

All of which seems like a much bigger deal than whether Facebook messed with your news feed, which was the paper that came out No. 1 in the ranking.

If where we’re headed seems like a bummer, where we came from is a source of fascination. Human beings were making cave stencils by blowing pigment at their hands 40,000 years ago in Indonesia. How about that? The analysis of the genome of a 7,000-year-old skeleton suggests that pale skin was a more recent adaptation than previously thought. Interesting, no?

Another paper that makes the list is titled “How to Make More Published Research True.” The author, John P.A. Ioannidis, warns that because of the built-in inefficiencies and perverse reward mechanisms of academic publishing, “the majority of research effort is currently wasted.” He’s been sounding the alarm bell on that topic for a long while (Mr. Ioannidis is also the author of the much-discussed 2005 paper “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False”), and he proposes a number of reasonable but tough-to-enforce solutions, like larger studies and more replication.

It’s a reminder not to put too much stock in a single study, no matter how many times it’s tweeted.

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Tom Bartlett is a senior writer who covers science and other things. Follow him on Twitter @tebartl.

We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Tom Bartlett
Tom Bartlett is a senior writer who covers science and ideas. Follow him on Twitter @tebartl.
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