ArticlePLoS biology2018
Large-scale investigation of the reasons why potentially important genes are ignored.
Article in PLoS biology, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 148 papers, 4 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
148 citing papers in PubMed, 4 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- The neuroanatomy of developmental language disorder: a systematic review and meta-analysis.Nature human behaviour · 2024Pooled it
- The characteristics of early-stage research into human genes are substantially different from subsequent research.PLoS biology · 2022Pooled it
- Meta-Analysis of Gene Popularity: Less Than Half of Gene Citations Stem from Gene Regulatory Networks.Genes · 2021Pooled it
- Ageing transcriptome meta-analysis reveals similarities and differences between key mammalian tissues.Aging · 2021Pooled it
- A sequence-based classifier distinguishes phenotype-associated genes from other gene models in plants.Genome research · 2026Article
- Developmental and tissue expression breadth define distinct but overlapping classes of housekeeping genes.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Five genomes, same suspects: a comparative filter for plant GWAS candidates.Plant physiology · 2026Article
- Literature-derived, context-aware gene regulatory networks improve biological predictions and mathematical modeling.Bioinformatics (Oxford, England) · 2026Article
- Context-Aware Multilevel Classification of Semantic Relations in Drug-Adverse Drug Reaction (ADR) Networks-Predicting Drug-Induced Liver Injury (DILI) as a Case Study.Chemical research in toxicology · 2026Article
- A comparative approach for selecting orthologous candidate genes in genome-wide association studies across multiple species.Plant physiology · 2026Article
- Evolutionary and functional constraints structure human gene research visibility.BMC genomics · 2026Article
- Alkamines reveal a hidden layer of steroid and drug metabolism.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Onset of embryonic and placental defects coincide in 19 of 22 novel mid-gestation lethal murine knockout lines.Development (Cambridge, England) · 2026Article
- Advancing target discovery through disease-specific integration of multi-modal target identification models and comprehensive benchmarking system.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Mining Two Decades of Soybean Genomics Literature Using Rule-Based Text Mining: Chromosome-Resolved Patterns ofInternational journal of molecular sciences · 2026Article
- Article
- Cell atlases and the developmental foundations of the phenotype.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Synteny - a high throughput web tool to streamline causal gene prioritisation and provide insight into protein function.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Genetic Convergence Analysis of CRISPR Perturbations Deciphers Gene Functional Similarity.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Cellular and genetic mechanisms that shape the development and evolution of tail vertebral proportion in mice and jerboas.Nature communications · 2025Article
88 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Biomedical research has been previously reported to primarily focus on a minority of all known genes. Here, we demonstrate that these differences in attention can be explained, to a large extent, exclusively from a small set of identifiable chemical, physical, and biological properties of genes. Together with knowledge about homologous genes from model organisms, these features allow us to accurately predict the number of publications on individual human genes, the year of their first report, the levels of funding awarded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the development of drugs against disease-associated genes. By explicitly identifying the reasons for gene-specific bias and performing a meta-analysis of existing computational and experimental knowledge bases, we describe gene-specific strategies for the identification of important but hitherto ignored genes that can open novel directions for future investigation.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.