While I have not tried to measure whether search term frequency is closely correlated with the amount of interest or activity in a field of research, I often find it useful, and believe that the search term growth rate likely corresponds somewhat to change in funding and/or research activity and its offshoots.
Below, I have searched three terms (with quotes) on Google Scholar, not including citations, for years in the close interval [2000, 2021]. Note that (1) corresponds to cumulative results, and (2) corresponds to results for that particular year.
I am unsure how to resolve the massive differences between the number of search results for “gain-of-function” and “gain-of-function research”. From skimming the articles that appeared after each search, one explanation might be that there is indeed a lot of gain-of-function research that only uses the term gain-of-function (e.g., “gain-of-function mutation”). I still don’t suspect the overwhelming majority of the results from searching “gain-of-function” actually refer to gain-of-function research, but the evidence that many of the results are What We Want leads me to believe that this graph is probably useful for looking at the growth in the field.
One challenge here is that GOF research is a charged ethical issue, and if you look at the papers, a lot of them are on the ethical concerns. Another chunk is looking at gain of function mutations in cancer, which is irrelevant. Researchers engineering gain of function mutations in pathogens don’t necessarily put that language in the title or abstract. For example, the infamous avian flu GOF research by Fouchier in ferrets didn’t use the term “gain of function” in the title or abstract.
There’s a baseline growth rate for research generally, and output doubles about every 17 years. Given the charged nature of GOF research and the recent moratorium, I’d expect its publication pattern to diverge from the general rate. And since it’s a small field, I’d also expect that noise from irrelevant findings to swamp any signal from the kind of potential pandemic enhancing research we are worried about.
While I have not tried to measure whether search term frequency is closely correlated with the amount of interest or activity in a field of research, I often find it useful, and believe that the search term growth rate likely corresponds somewhat to change in funding and/or research activity and its offshoots.
Below, I have searched three terms (with quotes) on Google Scholar, not including citations, for years in the close interval [2000, 2021]. Note that (1) corresponds to cumulative results, and (2) corresponds to results for that particular year.
I am unsure how to resolve the massive differences between the number of search results for “gain-of-function” and “gain-of-function research”. From skimming the articles that appeared after each search, one explanation might be that there is indeed a lot of gain-of-function research that only uses the term gain-of-function (e.g., “gain-of-function mutation”). I still don’t suspect the overwhelming majority of the results from searching “gain-of-function” actually refer to gain-of-function research, but the evidence that many of the results are What We Want leads me to believe that this graph is probably useful for looking at the growth in the field.
One challenge here is that GOF research is a charged ethical issue, and if you look at the papers, a lot of them are on the ethical concerns. Another chunk is looking at gain of function mutations in cancer, which is irrelevant. Researchers engineering gain of function mutations in pathogens don’t necessarily put that language in the title or abstract. For example, the infamous avian flu GOF research by Fouchier in ferrets didn’t use the term “gain of function” in the title or abstract.
There’s a baseline growth rate for research generally, and output doubles about every 17 years. Given the charged nature of GOF research and the recent moratorium, I’d expect its publication pattern to diverge from the general rate. And since it’s a small field, I’d also expect that noise from irrelevant findings to swamp any signal from the kind of potential pandemic enhancing research we are worried about.