Research trends: Microbiome

Research in biomedical sciences has it’s trends as in many areas of science. I’ve become interested in microbiome research recently and might stay on it for number of years. As computational biologics, I wanted to quantitatively examine the growth in microbiome research. So I used ISI Web of Science. I performed two independent searches from all articles published in the past 10 years (excluding 2018 as it’s half way through):

• First, articles that relate to any of these topics: genome/genetics/transcriptome/proteome/microbiome anmetagenomics.
• Second, articles relating to microbiome or metagenomics topics.

I normalized each set of returned results and plotted (see figure above). Relative trendiness of microbiome becomes very apparent in 2014 and is continuing to grow.