Kalbuaji B

Darkness in the Human Gene and Protein Function Space: Widely Modest or Absent Illumination by the Life Science Literature and the Trend for Fewer Protein Function Discoveries Since 2000

The mentioning of gene names in the body of the scientific literature 1901-2017 and their fractional counting was used as a proxy to assess the level of biological function discovery. We define a literature score of one as full publication equivalent (FPE), the amount of literature necessary to achieve one publication solely dedicated to a gene. We find that less than 5000 human genes have each at least 100 FPEs in the available literature corpus.