Researchers are surprised by their own findings
Discovery is the watchword of scholarly research, and new observations serve to propel scientific knowledge ever forward. Yet the lay observer might be interested to learn just how often the authors of research papers are surprised by their own findings. A search of the Scopus database for articles containing the word root ‘surpris*’ in the title, abstract or keywords retrieves almost 6,000 articles published in 2006, more than 0.5% of all articles that year. In fact, looking at this proportion over the last decade, authors appear to be about 3% more surprised by their own research every year!
A disciplinary breakdown of the ‘surprising’ articles identified in 2006 shows that the greatest proportion is published in Economics, Econometrics and Finance (1.25% of articles), while the least are found in the Energy and Engineering fields (0.11% and 0.17%, respectively). Authors in the Agricultural and Biological Sciences are surprised at the average rate of 0.51%.
Researchers should take heart, as one recent example of such a ‘surprising’ research finding was reported by Andrew Fire and Craig Mello in 1998 (1) and led to the award of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. It has been cited almost 3,400 times to date.
(1) Fire, A. (1998) “Potent and specific genetic interference by double-stranded RNA in Caenorhabditis elegans”, Nature, Vol. 391, No. 6669, pp. 806–811. |
