.jpg?width=50&name=DSC_0028%20(1).jpg)
←Back to resources Most AI companies are probably not AI companies.
2024 was a year of incredible discovery. A new injectable miracle drug protects against HIV for six months with every shot. Breakthroughs in T-cell therapy can help treat autoimmune diseases like lupus and multiple sclerosis for the first time. NASA’s JWST observatory has observed more bright galaxies in the distant dawn of time than ever thought possible. New RNA pesticides can protect agriculture and ecology while still targeting harmful pests.
The research world also experienced a fascinating year of biomedical discoveries, like new devices to track cardiac disease and applying large language models to scale biomedical texts.
That’s only the beginning of the 2024 research worth catching up on. NewsRx’s BUTTER covers millions of peer-reviewed research articles, preprints, patents, clinical trials, and more—and can sort through the enormous load of scientific discoveries from the past year in order to discover the most relevant and insightful bits and pieces of progress in science, as well as observations on relevant research trends. Read on to discover what’s rising and falling, moving and shaking in the fields of medicine, artificial intelligence, climate change, and geopolitics.
Health and Medicine Trends
The COVID-19 research boom is finally over.
The emergent pandemic captivated research interest, inspiring thousands of scientists to put aside their ongoing projects to contribute to the global effort of understanding the deadly disease. But most countries around the world escaped the worst parts of the pandemic over the course of 2021 and 2022. As a consequence, scientific interest peaked in 2021, and the number of published articles peaked in 2022. Slowly, scientists turned their interest to their previous fields of research and new horizons.
Preprints became a powerful tool for rapidly sharing discoveries about COVID-19, but scientists have shifted away from the medium as the stresses of the pandemic lessen.
Meanwhile, most of the research interest in COVID-19 this past year has been in cross-disciplinary fields, dealing with environmental issues and digital technology.
Now, let’s turn our eye to medicine as a whole.
Medical research exploded throughout the late 2010s, with many major areas such as mental health and public health growing by factors of five to ten. However, such growth has lessened and stabilized since the pandemic. One of the biggest sub-fields within medicine has been mental health, which features some noteworthy trends of its own.
The largest research topics in health and medicine as a whole in 2024 were mental health, public health, COVID-19, obesity, breast cancer, personalized medicine, tissue engineering, and Alzheimer’s disease. Among these, personalized medicine grew by far the most.
In mental health, the leading topics were anxiety, depression, technology, and dementia, with anxiety studies seeing the most growth.
Personalized medicine, which uses an individual’s genetic profile and medical data to improve their health, is taking off at a remarkable pace. With nearly twice as many studies compared to just four years ago, personalized medicine is on track to become the new and essential 2020s approach to better and smarter health care.
Data also reveals which institutions applied for and were issued the most medical patents in 2024:
Technology and AI Research Trends
With the emergence of ChatGPT in 2023, much popular attention has shifted to the LLM platform, asking: what consequences does this have for the field of science? Yes, the broader public has been greatly affected and inspired by the platform, but did researchers take the same level of interest?
As we have explored in previous annual research reviews, artificial intelligence and machine learning have exploded on to the scientific scene over the last ten years. Seven years ago, there were under 1,000 peer-reviewed studies exploring machine learning and AI. This year, there were well over 23,000.
ChatGPT and LLMs are a much newer research phenomenon. Just four years ago, there were essentially zero peer reviewed research articles about large language models of any GPT model (GPT-2, etc). Starting last year, this number exploded, as researchers dove into the technology that is reshaping industry and daily life. The biggest applications in research were engineering, education, medicine, and information technology.
Looking at the field of artificial intelligence research more broadly, all areas have exploded in attention since 2017. The top six fields for AI research in 2024 were medicine, networks, robotics, information technology, mathematics, and sustainability. One other topic to keep an eye on is AI in finance. This area has grown fourfold since 2020 up to around 800 peer-reviewed studies this year.
Climate Change and Environmental Research
Global climate change has exceeded 1 degree Celsius, even as many countries stumble on climate policy progress. Fortunately, science on the subject has been productive: renewable energy use is surging around the world, and conservation efforts have proved successful at curbing biodiversity loss.
Sustainability research has expanded across disciplines, becoming a common form of research touching on climate change, biology, ecology, social sciences, and even the humanities. But all climate change sub-disciplines—with the exception of climate modeling—have seen growth and increased research attention. More researchers than ever are exploring how to make agriculture more resilient to climate change’s various effects.
There is one other notable trend in the world of climate research: Asia, especially China, produces the vast majority of it. China’s research output alone was greater than all of Europe combined.
What particularly stands out here is just how far behind the U.S. lags on climate research. In the field of cancer research, by contrast, the U.S. produces around 82% as much research as China on the subject, compared to just 36% as much on climate change.
In terms of other notable countries, Canada and the UK in particular punch above their weight, producing over three times more studies per capita compared to the U.S. or France.
Geopolitical Conflict
2024 was far from a stable geopolitical year. Brutal conflicts in Ukraine, Syria, Gaza, Lebanon, and Sudan have left over a hundred thousand dead this year alone. Unfortunately, not many peer-reviewed research articles have covered these conflicts to offer humanitarian, scientific, and political solutions.
Other conflicts, such as those in South Sudan, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Ethiopia had just one or two peer-reviewed research articles examining them in 2024. In addition, a substantial plurality of the articles on the Russia-Ukraine conflict were about trickle-down effects of the war on other areas, such as economics and finance.
Only about 10% of peer reviewed studies on the Russia-Ukraine War were related to military or humanitarian issues. By contrast, these topics accounted for over half of the research on the Israel-Hamas war.
In a year of scientific growth, accomplishments, and discovery, we are proud to support scientists and researchers with our research coverage and powerful tool BUTTER. Try out BUTTER to keep up with the latest research in your field, and follow our blog for relevant insights in the world of science, research, and knowledge discovery.
- The best apps for researchers and scientists
- Navigating scientific article submission: Tips for instant success
- Why drug development is slowing down, and what to do about it
- Comprehensive Guide: The 21st Century Scientist
*All data is based on NewsRx coverage, using the BUTTER online platform. Certain studies may be excluded from coverage for various reasons. For more information, see NewsRx.com.
