Figure 2. Articles focusing on less popular genes tend to accrue more citations.

(a) Density plot shows correlation between articles per gene before 2015 and median citations to articles published in 2015. Contours correspond to deciles in density. Solid red line shows locally weighted scatterplot smoothing (LOWESS) regression. ρ is Spearman rank correlation and p the significance values of the Spearman rank correlation as described by Kendall and Stuart, 1973. We forgo depicting more recent years than 2015 to allow for citations to accumulate over multiple years, providing a more sensitive and robust readout of long-term impact. (b) Spearman correlation of previous gene popularity (i.e. number of articles) to median citations per year since 1990. Solid blue line indicates nominal Spearman correlation, shaded region indicates bootstrapped 95% confidence interval (n=1000). Only articles with a single gene in the title/abstract are considered, excluding the 30.4% of gene-focused studies which feature more than one gene in the title/abstract. For more recent years, where articles have had less time to accumulate citations, insufficient signal may cause correlation to converge toward zero.

Figure 2—figure supplement 1. Likelihoods of being highly cited (top 5% of citations among all articles about genes), panel (a) or lowly cited (bottom 5% of citations among all articles about genes), panel (b) for articles about the most popular genes (top 5% accumulated articles) versus articles about the least popular genes (bottom 5% accumulated articles) by year of publication.

Only articles with a single gene in the title/abstract are considered. Shaded regions show ±1 standard error of the proportion.

Figure 2—figure supplement 2. Spearman correlation and significance (Kendall and Stuart, 1973; Kendall and Stuart, 1961) of normalized gene popularity vs normalized article citation rank for articles within disease MeSH terms from 2014 to 2018.

Only articles with a single gene in the title/abstract are included. (a) volcano plot of Spearman correlations, where size of dot corresponds to number of articles meeting criteria for each MeSH term. (b–g) Plots for several MeSH terms, corresponding to letters highlighted in (a). Solid red lines show LOWESS regression. Only MeSH terms under the ‘Diseases’ heading (tree number starting with ‘C’) with 30 articles or more were considered (602 MeSH terms).

Figure 2—figure supplement 3. Spearman correlation and significance (Kendall and Stuart, 1973; Kendall and Stuart, 1961) of normalized gene popularity vs normalized article citation rank for articles within technique-related MeSH terms from 2014 to 2018.

Only articles with a single gene in the title/abstract are included. (a) volcano plot of Spearman correlations, where size of dot corresponds to number of articles meeting criteria for each MeSH term. (b–g) Plots for several MeSH terms, corresponding to letters highlighted in (a). Solid red lines show LOWESS regression. Only MeSH terms under the ‘Investigative Techniques’ heading (tree number starting with ‘E05’) with 30 articles or more were considered (264 MeSH terms).