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Ten species comprise half of the bacteriology literature, leaving most species unstudied

Jensen, P. A.

2025-01-04 microbiology
10.1101/2025.01.04.631297 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Microbiology research has historically focused on a few species of model organisms. Our bibliographic analysis finds extreme bias in the distribution of bacteriology research across species, with half of all papers referencing only ten species and 74% of all known species remaining unstudied. Microbiologists will need to broaden their perspective and embrace complexity to develop a complete understanding of the microbial world.

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The top 7 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.