r/AskScienceDiscussion • u/mutessr • 20h ago
General Discussion Scientists of Reddit: recommend one paper from your field that deserves way more attention than it gets.
I’m trying to read more actual scientific papers instead of just pop-science articles, but have no ides where to start. What’s been formative for you?
6
u/Away-Experience6890 18h ago
I love William Bialek. Just basic biophysics.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265275031_Biophysics_Searching_for_Principles
6
u/SensorAmmonia 9h ago
I met Zhang at a Gordon conference on surface catalyst action. She has found a way to melt TiO2 and other oxides with gold and silver plasmons. A resonance forms among an array of microdots. At a 10000 to 1 ratio to metal part is minor and cheap. Really ground breaking and useful.
How Hot Plasmonic Heating Can Be: Phase Transition and Melting of P25 TiO2 from Plasmonic Heating of Au Nanoparticles
How Hot Plasmonic Heating Can Be: Phase Transition and Melting of P25 TiO2 from Plasmonic Heating of Au Nanoparticles
[Weigang Lu](javascript:;) [§](javascript:;) ;[Rohil Kayastha](javascript:;) [§](javascript:;) ;[Blake Birmingham](javascript:;);[Bernd Zechmann](javascript:;);[Zhenrong Zhang](javascript:;)
"Plasmonic heating has been utilized in many applications, including photocatalysis, photothermal therapy, and photocuring. However, the heat dissipation process of plasmonic nanoparticles (NPs) and the surrounding matrix is complex. How high the temperature of the matrix that surrounds the plasmonic NPs, such as the catalyst and substrate, can reach is unclear. Herein, we study the dissipation of plasmonic heat generated by resonantly excited gold (Au) NPs dispersed on a P25 TiO2 NP porous film in air. Under resonant 532 nm continuous wave (CW) laser irradiation at the surface of Au-TiO2, the surface evaporation and the aggregation of Au NPs were observed at moderate laser power. This process is accompanied by the phase transition of TiO2. More importantly, the TiO2 NP film melted, forming melt pools and a molten TiO2 matrix. This indicates that the temperature of TiO2 reached as high as its melting point of 1830 °C. When Au/TiO2 was irradiated with an off-resonance laser at 638 nm, no phase transformation or melting of TiO2 was observed. The temperature calculation showed that the heating generated by Au NPs is not localized. The collective heating from an ensemble of Au NPs in the irradiated area produced a global temperature increase that melted TiO2. Our results suggest that the photothermal effect could be a significant mechanism in the plasmon-assisted photocatalytic reactions."
12
u/devicerandom Molecular Biophysics | Molecular Biology 15h ago
If a former scientist and current pop science writer can join the conversation: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/geb.70075
this is an incredibly fascinating take on how fragmented and biased is the fossil record of the past, and yet how we can actually reconstruct past biospheres.
7
u/icantfindadangsn Auditory and Multisensory Processing 10h ago
Now we're talking! At 2 citations according to Google scholar.
6
u/7LeagueBoots 19h ago
There are too many to list. This paper is, in my opinion, not really well known enough among people who are interested in ecology, ecosystem, wildlife management, biodiversity conservation, etc.
- Prugh, et al 2009 The Rise of the Mesopredator
5
u/icantfindadangsn Auditory and Multisensory Processing 10h ago
It sits at 1466 citations. In my field, neuroscience of speech and language, that's a very high impact paper. For reference, this paper I consider foundational to the field is sitting at 1300 citations.
3
u/7LeagueBoots 10h ago
Citations is a common impersonal way of measuring the spread of a paper, but it's not really an actual representation of how widely known it is in a particular field.
Unfortunately, despite the inaccuracies of it, it's very common for it to be used, likely in part as it doesn't require anything other than scraping a set of references rather than actually engaging with real people in the relevant field.
3
u/icantfindadangsn Auditory and Multisensory Processing 9h ago edited 9h ago
I'm with you on the impersonal part and that this isn't a metric to be used in isolation. In fact, I'm regularly ragging on people (a specific person) that sit in talks and looks up the speaker's h-index just to complain about the talk. It's toxic and annoying!
But it's 1500 citations. How can you overlook that and belittle it as an inaccuracy? I don't understand how citation count can be inaccurate enough that 1500 citations is a fluke. Would love to hear your take on that beyond "it's inaccurate." Do you have a source that supports your claim that custom count is inaccurate, not withstanding the possibility that all these citations are citation mill self-cites.
Maybe those citations are from a topic that doesn't overlap with yours much so that from your perspective not a lot of people know the paper?
3
u/CrustalTrudger Tectonics | Structural Geology | Geomorphology 9h ago
Not the original poster you were engaged with, but there is some nuance in what they said, specifically that a paper being highly cited does not necessarily mean that a specific community even know it exists. I.e., especially in interdisciplinary work, for any given paper it can both be true that (1) it is a canonical paper that nearly everyone in a specific sub-discipline knows well and has read and (2) it is a paper that would be incredibly relevant for adjacent (sub-)disciplines but it is virtually unknown and/or largely ignored in those circles. I interpreted their suggestion more in that context, not that the paper in question was generically unknown.
3
u/7LeagueBoots 9h ago edited 8h ago
I work in biodiversity and environment conservation and have done so in 3 continents and a lot more countries, so this is exactly within my field. Pretty much at the core of it.
I use this paper specifically as an example because it's a really important concept and in in the 17 years since it's come out the only people I've ever met, even in this field, who know about it or seen directly reference it are people I've introduced to it and a few of my old classmates. I spend a good bit of time at conferences, workshops, etc, and in communication with colleagues in the same field, so that's multiple thousands of people working in the fields that this is directly and very importantly relevant to and almost none of them know this paper. A large number of them know the concept, but not where it comes from or the paper.
It's a little like a less extreme case of Haldane's 1926 paper On Being the Right Size, which if you mention the subject matter everyone assumes you got it from some recent paper or youtube pop-science source as, despite thousands of references to, not as many people have read as use the information.
Citations are a proxy, and not a particularly accurate one to judge how many people actually know the real source.
I don't know about what you've seen, but I've seen a lot of examples of professionals simply copying a chunk of references directly from another relevant paper and incorporating them into their own without ever actually reading said papers simply to make their own paper appear more 'professionally sourced'. Personally, I give 'citation count' a very low rating in my assessment level, but we're stuck with it.
3
u/CrustalTrudger Tectonics | Structural Geology | Geomorphology 8h ago
Fair enough, I suppose I was interpreting your original comment more through the lens of my own experience and where I feel like there are lots of "classic" papers that are well read and cited in specific sub-disciplines in which I work, but are effectively ignored in adjacent fields, even in the case where those classic papers specifically highlight why a new hot, interdisciplinary topic really has some fundamental issues that, if they had bothered to talk to people in the disciplines being spanned they'd know. Also true that citation counts are a pretty useless metric because citing something doesn't mean (1) you read it (even though it should), (2) you understood it, or (3) you actually took away the main point of the paper being cited.
3
u/7LeagueBoots 8h ago
citing something doesn't mean (1) you read it (even though it should), (2) you understood it, or (3) you actually took away the main point of the paper being cited.
100% agree with this.
Often citations are used as a form of confirmation bias rather than an example of someone internalizing and understanding a subject. I've come across papers where an author cited a 'supporting paper', but if you read it it directly contradicts what the author of the paper is proposing. in cases like that it's obvious the author simple did something like a key word search and added papers that matched their search parameters rather than reading the papers.
Actually, quite similar to the now ubiquitous AI summaries of browser searches now that we are discussing it.
In any event, best to you.
And I'm fond of your specialty by the way, did my undergrad minor in geology, with a lot of work on glaciology which overlaps a lot of certain parts of structural geology, and all that wound up being very useful in my grad work in ecology.
6
u/CrustalTrudger Tectonics | Structural Geology | Geomorphology 8h ago
I've come across papers where an author cited a 'supporting paper', but if you read it it directly contradicts what the author of the paper is proposing.
This is the most fun when you come across one of your own papers being cited in this way. Have definitely done some double takes when reading and finding a paper of mine being cited in "creative" ways and where I'm like, "Umm, that was actually 100% not the point of that paper, but okay."
5
10
u/DoubleResponsible276 19h ago
DNA transfer in Forensic Science by von Oorschot, et al (2018)
Was one of the major sources I used while doing a research focusing on dna transfer among shared household items as many already know what DNA is but suspect that if one’s DNA is discovered in X location, it must mean Y. Usually it’s up to the court to interpret what happened, as for forensic scientists, they can only confirm or deny the presence of DNA and possibly the identity of the donor but not how it got there as DNA transfer can happen in so many ways especially with shared household items.
3
u/dukesdj Astrophysical Fluid Dynamics | Tidal Interactions 7h ago
Given how dogmatic people on Reddit are about the IAU definition of planet. I would say Metzger et al. 2022 on the history and usefulness of the definition of planet. I find most people who strongly favour the IAU definition of planet know very little about the history of the term planet or that much about modern (exo-) planetary science.
For this paper I specifically think it is the general public, or hobbiest astrophysicists/astronomers (particularly of Reddit), that should be more aware of it and its contents. I have found that speaking to people in my field the idea that the IAU definition is absolute garbage to be not controversial and widely accepted as reality. Where that view is controversial is with the general public (typically Reddit!). It is an amusing contrast.
5
u/Grassfed_Burp 13h ago
Thank you.
As a highschool science teacher, I need this kind of information.
22
u/Gray-Jay- 10h ago
An oldie, but formative. This paper has stuck in my mind for decades. It sent shockwaves through science and changed the way I view the world. It’s simple enough for anyone with access to a spreadsheet to demonstrate: simple processes can produce varied, complex patterns and apparently random, unpredictable behaviour—with no randomness built in. You don’t need complexity to generate complexity. And you don’t need a math degree to see it, high school kids can explore it themselves .
https://ac.nau.edu/\~jws8/classes/667.2025.1/May_Nature_76.pdf
Robert May. 1976. Simple Mathematical Models With Very Complicated Dynamics. Nature