Eddie Holmes (Uni Sydney) co-authored an article with a mass, a mass, of media coverage in 2020

Data analyst Altmetrics tracked coverage of journal articles across social and legacy media in 2020 to identify the research that attracted attention outside the lab.

Seven of the top ten papers were about the pandemic, including the New England Journal of Medicine, calling the Trump Administration “dangerously incompetent,” for its handling of COVID-19.

The other three are an article on the possibility of microbial life on Venus (sixth), a toilet that analyses excreta for signs of disease (seventh), a retracted article on the outcome of women scientists mentoring younger women colleagues (ninth).

The number one article, by five researchers, including Professor Holmes, was published in Nature Medicine in March. The authors analysed genomic data to conclude COVID-19, “is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”