“…Recent studies have demonstrated the highly imbalanced research effort directed towards individual human protein-coding genes [ 1 – 8 ], which manifests itself in several ways, including the number of publications per gene, the number of human-curated and computationally predicted functional annotations, the number of gene names and gene symbols, and the number of patents containing their nucleotide sequences ( S1 Fig ). Plausibly, this observed disparity could reflect a lack of importance of many genes, but more likely it could also reflect existing social structures of research [ 9 , 10 ], scientific and economic reward systems [ 11 , 12 ], medical and societal relevance [ 13 – 15 ], preceding discoveries [ 2 , 16 ], serendipity [ 17 , 18 ], the availability of technologies [ 19 , 20 ] and reagents [ 6 , 21 ], and other intrinsic characteristics of genes [ 22 – 24 ]. It remains unclear, however, if any of these factors can significantly explain the observed number of publications on individual human genes.…”