September 16, 2014

Is genomics past its peak?

In his excellent blog, Robert Plenge recently asked how far along the hype cycle we are with regards to applying genomics to drug discovery.

The absolute number of genomics papers published in 2014 is likely to be higher than in any previous year. But when normalising by the total number of biomedical papers listed on Pubmed, a search engine for biomedical publications, it seems like we may be past the Peak of Inflated Expectations. The proportion of papers that contain genomics in their title or abstract has peaked in 2012.


I found the number of publications each year by searching for genomics on Pubmed. The number of papers for 2014 is an extrapolation based on the number of papers to date.