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Figure 1 | BMC Developmental Biology

Figure 1

From: Developmental biologists' choice of subjects approximates to a power law, with no evidence for the existence of a special group of 'model organisms'

Figure 1

The distribution of attention given to different genera in the developmental literature. 1a shows a linear plot the incidence of a genus being studied in any of the five years under study versus the rank of that incidence (most studied = rank 1, second-most = rank 2 etc). Fig 1b shows a Zipf plot (i.e. log-log, incidence versus rank) of the aggregate data from developmental papers in 1965, 1975, 1985, 1995 and 2005. Dots show the data, and the line shows a power-law trend line. 1c shows a similar plot of each year plotted separately; the trends of each set of data each approximate to a power law trend line for that year, the lines of each set of data being approximately parallel. The progressive diagonal shift from the origin reflects the increasing size of the developmental biology literature (157 papers in 1965, 1838 in 2005). This is illustrated by 1d, in which the data for just January 2005 fall on a line about as far from the origin as the data from the whole year of 1965.

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