Happy Monday before Christmas! We’ve almost made it through the year. But before we wrap it up, I have one more paper to add to your holiday reading list 1/

I want to point out this is consistent with our recent paper on breakthroughs in biomedical science, which found that transformative advances made 2014-2017 were more clinically oriented than those made 1994-1997 (read that paper here) 9/ www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

To start developing an understanding of how to support scientific advances, we analyzed the funding opportunities offered over a span of 32 years, together with the resulting portfolio of applications and awards. Read the whole story here: 7/ www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Prediction of transformative breakthroughs in biomedical research https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.16.694385v1

Article-level metrics preferable for author recognition than journal-level metrics 🧪 journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Do the journals you publish in align with your values? We push for an alternative to traditional journals that perpetuate a system of prestige and skewed incentives.

"In other words, basing our approach on journallevel metrics would generate enough noise to make the signal of a future breakthrough difficult or impossible to detect. " On a similar note: journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

This is a very cool story

"A combination of features produces these diagnostic signals: a burst of papers exploring a novel scientific concept, an unusually high number of very influential papers in specialty journals, and low topical cohesion of the associated content."

Today is a big day. After many years of work, I’m excited to finally share a paper describing a novel approach to identifying potential breakthroughs in biomedical research, up to twelve years before the breakthrough itself occurs. 1/15

Are authors fairly judged by assessing the #journals in which their work is published? @bihutchins.bsky.social &co reveal that most influential papers are published in lower tier journals, and more authors would be better recognized with #ArticleLevelMetrics #ALMs @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4oV58Ed

Can scientists get a fair shake publishing solid work in specialty journals? Definitely if article metrics were used; many such papers are revealed to be as influential as papers from high tier journals 1/4 #AcademicTwitter #AcademicChatter #NIH #NSF #OpenScience journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

When the study confirms intuition: "We find that the number of papers cited at least as well as those appearing in high-impact factor journals vastly exceeds the number of papers published in such venues." https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3003532 Decades […]

Are authors fairly judged by assessing the #journals in which their work is published? @bihutchins.bsky.social &co reveal that most influential papers are published in lower tier journals, and more authors would be better recognized with #ArticleLevelMetrics #ALMs @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4oV58Ed

Journal prestige overlooks most influential papers. Our analysis shows that top impact factor journals only catch a small fraction of equally influential articles. There's a lot more science deserving of recognition! #AcademicTwitter #AcademicChatter journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

@aatishb.bsky.social got me on the record. “My colleagues did an outstanding job to work their butts off to approve things.” I swear it's true. It's still true at #NIH.