ArticleeLife2020
COVID-19 research risks ignoring important host genes due to pre-established research patterns.
Article in eLife, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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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.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled 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
- A comparative approach for selecting orthologous candidate genes in genome-wide association studies across multiple species.Plant physiology · 2026Article
- The pivot penalty in research.Nature · 2025Article
- A graph theoretical approach to experimental prioritization in genome-scale investigations.Mammalian genome : official journal of the International Mammalian Genome Society · 2024Article
- The Interleukin-6 gene variants may protect against SARS-CoV-2 infection and the severity of COVID-19: a case-control study in a Moroccan population.BMC medical genomics · 2024Article
- Article
- Meta-Research: understudied genes are lost in a leaky pipeline between genome-wide assays and reporting of results.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Did the early full genome sequencing of yeast boost gene function discovery?Biology direct · 2023Article
- Ageing restructures the transcriptome of the hypothalamic supraoptic nucleus and alters the response to dehydration.npj aging · 2023Article
- Protection of the human gene research literature from contract cheating organizations known as research paper mills.Nucleic acids research · 2022Review
- COVID-19: impact on Public Health and hypothesis-driven investigations on genetic susceptibility and severity.Immunogenetics · 2022Review
- Interpretable network propagation with application to expanding the repertoire of human proteins that interact with SARS-CoV-2.GigaScience · 2021Article
- HOW GENETICISTS CONTRIBUTE TO UNDERSTANDING OF COVID-19 DISEASE PATHOGENICITY.Acta endocrinologica (Bucharest, Romania : 2005)Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
It is known that research into human genes is heavily skewed towards genes that have been widely studied for decades, including many genes that were being studied before the productive phase of the Human Genome Project. This means that the genes most frequently investigated by the research community tend to be only marginally more important to human physiology and disease than a random selection of genes. Based on an analysis of 10,395 research publications about SARS-CoV-2 that mention at least one human gene, we report here that the COVID-19 literature up to mid-October 2020 follows a similar pattern. This means that a large number of host genes that have been implicated in SARS-CoV-2 infection by four genome-wide studies remain unstudied. While quantifying the consequences of this neglect is not possible, they could be significant.
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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.