科学家虽然不愿意坦诚承认，但内心喜欢自己的研究被媒体关注。精彩的科研故事是组成科学家职业的重要因素，是获得更多研究经费和更好职位的敲门砖。在将影响因子作为判断论文质量标准的同时，媒体关注度也逐渐成为评价学术影响的一个指标。

关于媒体评价的最突出案例，是英国伦敦的Digital Science公司建立的Altmetric评价系统。这种评价系统不是利用杂志影响因子，而是基于论文在媒体、博客、推特、脸书和维基百科等类非学术共同体被引用或转发的情况。每年12月份，该公司发布100篇当年度最热门的学术论文。

今年最热门的100篇论文分别来自34份学术期刊，作者分布在105个不同国家，在52个国际合作机构工作。其中第一名是2015年1月发表在《自然》上关于新抗生素的研究，论文共同作者波士顿东北大学微生物学家Brian Conlon对媒体如此关注这一研究此表示意外，因为这是一项比较冷门的研究，在CBS晚间新闻上看到关于细菌培养的照片是一种非常陌生的体验。

这这种影响已经吸引了新的合作研究，但是也给他们的研究带来新挑战，因为研究曾经声称细菌不可能对这种药物产生耐受。同样是波士顿东北大学微生物学家的 Kim Lewis说，毫无疑问这一声称也激怒了一些人，例如有医药公司提出让他们提供药物样本，他们将拿出能耐受这种药物的细菌突变种。

为了应对媒体的狂轰滥炸，一些科学家不得不把手头工作暂时搁置。维尔弗吉尼亚大学心理学家布雷恩•诺斯克说，这真是难以应付。他领导的项目8月发表在《科学》上，是关于大多数心理学研究无法重复的研究。在270位合作者的共同努力下，大家分成几个组，分别和说不同国家语言的记者进行沟通，其中最惨烈的一天，他用了整整5个小时向记者们介绍其他作者。

当然，受到媒体关注和是否有科学价值没有必然联系，一些媒体报道会增加Altmetric分数，例如在今年的热点论文名单中，排20名的一项研究是6月发表在《现代生物学》上的关于角恐龙的研究，记者关注这一研究只是因为一个求婚的致谢脚注，这与研究内容没有任何关系。

目录

1. A new antibiotic kills pathogens without detectable resistance

2. Autism Occurrence by MMR Vaccine Status Among US Children With Older Siblings With and Without Autism

3. Accelerated modern human–induced species losses: Entering the sixth mass extinction

4. Cancer etiology. Variation in cancer risk among tissues can be explained by the number of stem cell divisions

5. Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science

6. Plastic Pollution in the World's Oceans: More than 5 Trillion Plastic Pieces Weighing over 250,000 Tons Afloat at Sea

7. The geographical distribution of fossil fuels unused when limiting global warming to 2 °C

8. An Efficiency Comparison of Document Preparation Systems Used in Academic Research and Development

9. A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style

10. The Negative Association between Religiousness and Children’s Altruism across the World

11. Mapping tree density at a global scale

12. Long working hours and risk of coronary heart disease and stroke: a systematic review and meta-analysis of published and unpublished data for 603 838 individuals

13. Structural and functional features of central nervous system lymphatic vessels

14. National hiring experiments reveal 2:1 faculty preference for women on STEM tenure track

15. Evening use of light-emitting eReaders negatively affects sleep, circadian timing, and next-morning alertness

16. Shaping the oral microbiota through intimate kissing

17. CRISPR/Cas9-mediated gene editing in human tripronuclear zygotes

18. Climate change in the Fertile Crescent and implications of the recent Syrian drought

19. Spectral evidence for hydrated salts in recurring slope lineae on Mars

20. A New Horned Dinosaur Reveals Convergent Evolution in Cranial Ornamentation in Ceratopsidae

21. Whole-body endothermy in a mesopelagic fish, the opah, Lampris guttatus

22. Computer-based personality judgments are more accurate than those made by humans

23. Planet Hunters X. KIC 8462852 - Where's the Flux?

24. Sexist Games=Sexist Gamers? A Longitudinal Study on the Relationship Between Video Game Use and Sexist Attitudes

25. Consumption of spicy foods and total and cause specific mortality: population based cohort study

26. Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning

27. Plastic waste inputs from land into the ocean

28. Global, regional, and national incidence, prevalence, and years lived with disability for 301 acute and chronic diseases and injuries in 188 countries, 1990–2013: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2013

29. The genome of cultivated sweet potato contains Agrobacterium T-DNAs with expressed genes: An example of a naturally transgenic food crop

30. 3.3-million-year-old stone tools from Lomekwi 3, West Turkana, Kenya

31. A Neural Conversational Model

32. The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era

33. An investigation of the false discovery rate and the misinterpretation of p-values

34. Business culture and dishonesty in the banking industry

35. Heads-up limit hold’em poker is solved

36. Global, regional, and national age-sex specific all-cause and cause-specific mortality for 240 causes of death, 1990-2013: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2013

37. Scanning ultrasound removes amyloid-β and restores memory in an Alzheimer’s disease mouse model

38. Malignant Transformation of Hymenolepis nana in a Human Host.

39. Systematic Literature Review of Imaging Features of Spinal Degeneration in Asymptomatic Populations

40. Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century

41. Sedentary Time and Its Association With Risk for Disease Incidence, Mortality, and Hospitalization in Adults: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

42. 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, a Jupiter family comet with a high D/H ratio

43. Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus

44. Association between breastfeeding and intelligence, educational attainment, and income at 30 years of age: a prospective birth cohort study from Brazil

45. Am I normal? A systematic review and construction of nomograms for flaccid and erect penis length and circumference in up to 15 521 men

46. Photonic crystals cause active colour change in chameleons

47. Continuous liquid interface production of 3D objects

48. Recovery of large carnivores in Europe’s modern human-dominated landscapes

49. Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook

50. Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet

51. Potential Mechanisms for Cancer Resistance in Elephants and Comparative Cellular Response to DNA Damage in Humans

52. The association between exaggeration in health related science news and academic press releases: retrospective observational study

53. Identification of the remains of King Richard III

54. Insights into Sexism: Male Status and Performance Moderates Female-Directed Hostile and Amicable Behaviour

55. A specimen-level phylogenetic analysis and taxonomic revision of Diplodocidae (Dinosauria, Sauropoda)

56. Diet Soda Intake Is Associated with Long‐Term Increases in Waist Circumference in a Biethnic Cohort of Older Adults: The San Antonio Longitudinal Study of Aging

57. Dietary emulsifiers impact the mouse gut microbiota promoting colitis and metabolic syndrome

58. Intake of saturated and trans unsaturated fatty acids and risk of all cause mortality, cardiovascular disease, and type 2 diabetes: systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies

59. Mortality and Treatment Patterns Among Patients Hospitalized With Acute Cardiovascular Conditions During Dates of National Cardiology Meetings

60. Restoring Study 329: efficacy and harms of paroxetine and imipramine in treatment of major depression in adolescence

61. A smartphone dongle for diagnosis of infectious diseases at the point of care

62. Oxytocin-gaze positive loop and the coevolution of human-dog bonds

63. Deep Neural Networks are Easily Fooled: High Confidence Predictions for Unrecognizable Images

64. Evidence from randomised controlled trials did not support the introduction of dietary fat guidelines in 1977 and 1983: a systematic review and meta-analysis

65. The Anatomy of Medical Research: US and International Comparisons

66. Comparative risk assessment of alcohol, tobacco, cannabis and other illicit drugs using the margin of exposure approach

67. Vegetarian Dietary Patterns and the Risk of Colorectal Cancers

68. Identifying the source of perytons at the Parkes radio telescope

69. Comprehensive serological profiling of human populations using a synthetic human virome

70. Efficacy and safety of paracetamol for spinal pain and osteoarthritis: systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised placebo controlled trials

71. Complex archaea that bridge the gap between prokaryotes and eukaryotes

72. Sizing ocean giants: patterns of intraspecific size variation in marine megafauna

73. Unprecedented 21st century drought risk in the American Southwest and Central Plains

74. Physical activity and all-cause mortality across levels of overall and abdominal adiposity in European men and women: the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition Study (EPIC)

75. Randomized trial of peanut consumption in infants at risk for peanut allergy

76. Leisure Time Physical Activity and Mortality: A Detailed Pooled Analysis of the Dose-Response Relationship

77. The octopus genome and the evolution of cephalopod neural and morphological novelties

78. Weight training, aerobic physical activities, and long‐term waist circumference change in men

79. Breast Cancer Screening, Incidence, and Mortality Across US Counties

80. Homo erectus at Trinil on Java used shells for tool production and engraving

81. An ultraluminous quasar with a twelve-billion-solar-mass black hole at redshift 6.30

82. Observation of J/ψp resonances consistent with pentaquark states in Λ0b→J/ψK−p decays

83. Mediterranean Diet and Age-Related Cognitive Decline: A Randomized Clinical Trial

84. Consumption of sugar sweetened beverages, artificially sweetened beverages, and fruit juice and incidence of type 2 diabetes: systematic review, meta-analysis, and estimation of population attributable fraction

85. Small Amounts of Gluten in Subjects With Suspected Nonceliac Gluten Sensitivity: A Randomized, Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled, Cross-Over Trial

86. Knowledge-Based Trust: Estimating the Trustworthiness of Web Sources

87. Synthesis of phylogeny and taxonomy into a comprehensive tree of life

88. Revealing letters in rolled Herculaneum papyri by X-ray phase-contrast imaging

89. Global non-linear effect of temperature on economic production

90. Real-Time Visualization of Joint Cavitation

91. Lethal Interpersonal Violence in the Middle Pleistocene

92. Music as an aid for postoperative recovery in adults: a systematic review and meta-analysis

93. Gravitational lensing by spinning black holes in astrophysics, and in the movie Interstellar

94. An enigmatic plant-eating theropod from the Late Jurassic period of Chile

95. Polygenic risk scores for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder predict creativity

96. Effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy compared with maintenance antidepressant treatment in the prevention of depressive relapse or recurrence (PREVENT): a randomised controlled trial

97. Portion, package or tableware size for changing selection and consumption of food, alcohol and tobacco

98. Association Between Sauna Bathing and Fatal Cardiovascular and All-Cause Mortality Events

99. Systematic inequality and hierarchy in faculty hiring networks

100.Human language reveals a universal positivity bias