What you get
- Papers per year on the topic (title or abstract, MEDLINE).
- Sixteen broad fields — immunology, genetics, neurodegeneration and repair, imaging, biomarkers, treatment and trials, cell and gene therapy, microbiome and infection, metabolism, epidemiology, animal models, omics, symptoms and rehabilitation, digital health and AI, life stages, and health services — with each field’s share of the topic, year by year.
- Momentum: whether a field’s share grew, held or fell between the first and last three years, so a field only “rises” if it grows faster than the topic itself.
- Gaps: the least-studied fields, fields with few clinical trials or mostly animal studies, and field pairs that are rarely studied together.
Step by step
- Open Paper Explorer and choose <em>Research landscape</em>. Type a topic (separate synonyms with commas) and choose 5, 10, 15 or 20 years. About 190 small counting searches run in Europe PMC; results are kept in your browser for a week.
- Read the summary. Most studied, gaining attention, losing share and least studied fields, plus total papers and yearly growth.
- Use the focus map. Each bubble is a field: further right = larger share, higher = growing share. Click a bubble or any field name.
- Open a field. See its evidence profile (reviews, trials, meta-analyses, human and animal studies) compared with the whole topic, flagged gaps, established and emerging themes, and quoted limitations and open questions from recent abstracts.
- Go from field to papers. Browse the most-cited papers, the most-cited of the last three years, or the newest; analyse any paper in full, tick two to five to compare them, or add them to your reading list.
- Add your own field and find gaps. Add a field such as
Itaconate: itaconate, Irg1, Acod1, and run Find rarely combined fields to see field pairs studied together far less often than expected. - Track your own terms. In the Trend explorer, type targets, drugs or methods (for example
itaconate, BTK inhibitor, CAR-T) to see their papers per year and per 1,000 topic papers. - See which research reaches patients. From papers to trials sets each field’s registered interventional trials (ClinicalTrials.gov) against its papers and flags fields with many papers but few trials; each field panel lists trial phases, recruiting trials and the newest trials.
- See who funds it. Who funds this research counts the funders acknowledged in recent papers’ grant records (NIH institutes grouped), and shows which fields the top funders support.
Limits to keep in mind
- Counts are keyword matches in titles and abstracts; fields overlap and a paper can count in several.
- Paper counts measure attention, not quality or importance.
- The current year is incomplete and publication-type tags lag for recent papers.
Map multiple sclerosis now Next guide: comparing papers
Questions
Where do the numbers come from?
From Europe PMC (EMBL-EBI): MEDLINE records whose title or abstract contain the topic and a field’s terms; trial counts come from ClinicalTrials.gov and funders from Europe PMC grant records. The searches run from your browser.
Can I check whether a single paper has held up?
Yes: open the paper and use the Replication check tab, which reads open-access papers that cite it and marks each citing sentence as supporting, contrasting, method use or a neutral mention.
Can I use it for any disease or topic?
Yes. The fields are broad and general; for very specific topics, add your own fields.
Does it use AI to judge the research?
No. Trends are counts; limitations and open questions are sentences quoted from abstracts.
Found something wrong or unclear? Write to contact@solveseverything.com. See also: how results are validated.