2025 was defined by major blows to the ability and strength of science. The Trump administration launched a full-fledged war on research, devastating federal grant funding, making life harder at scientific agencies, and stripping bare scientific institutions and universities. The ripple effects of this landmark shift in U.S. scientific policy will be felt for years to come; elsewhere around the world, scientific and technological investment continued to advance.

Researchers at Dresden University confirmed that adults can still grow new neurons.

Tidal funding and policy shifts aside, this past year witnessed numerous revolutionary scientific studies and breakthroughs. Scientists filled in crucial knowledge gaps about our current understanding of T cell activation, suggesting paths and possibilities for improving T cell cancer therapies.  They devised new tools for studying hearing loss, allowing researchers to probe the previously inaccessible depths of the human inner ear. Scientists discovered that adults can still form neurons, in spite of the long-lasting assumption that humans are born with all of the neurons we’ll ever have. A new gene editing tool successfully managed to clear a patient’s cancer. And missions to Mars are off to inspect the magnetic fields and atmosphere of our planetary neighbor.

NewsRx’s BUTTER research platform reveals that 2025 was still an exceptional year in research, especially fields like artificial intelligence, medicine, and sustainability research. It also shows the unprecedented rise of open science and open access research across fields. In this article, we break down major research trends by the numbers in 2025 across scientific disciplines.

The Big Picture: Stagnation in Traditional Fields, Rise of Open Science

Science has been undergoing a quiet shift over the last five years.  

Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, the volume of peer-reviewed research increased drastically across most fields. Whether it was the hard sciences, soft sciences, social sciences, or humanities, more scientists around the world were publishing more studies, and at a more frequent rate.  

And while the volume of peer-reviewed research globally continues to rise, a review of research in traditional fields shows an unexpected trend taking shape throughout the 2020s. Namely, that the growth of traditional fields like biology, chemistry, sociology, and political science is tapering off.

With the exception of physics, the average change from 2021 compared to 2025 in published peer-reviewed articles in traditional disciplines was a 23% decline. Medicine and microbiology were other exceptions, with positive changes of 10% and 5% respectively. But social science articles in major fields declined 40% from 2021 to 2025, and articles in life sciences such as chemistry, biology, and ecology all saw drops in the 16-22% range. 

Taking a look at research topics under one of the life sciences shows some particulars of these shifts. In biology research, which had a 22.8% negative change in the number of articles in between 2021 and 2025, the total volume of cellular biology, molecular biology, and biochemistry peer-reviewed articles all significantly dropped.

Even in physics, which saw a 135% gain in 2025 research articles compared to 2021, many traditional sub-disciplines saw declines in research productivity. These included astronomy (down from 8,000+ articles in 2021 to around 2,000 in 2025) and applied physics (around 8,500 articles in 2021 down to just over 5,000 in 2025). 

While the causes behind these shifts warrant further investigation, some possible factors include interdisciplinary migration toward interdisciplinary topics, higher standards of methodological rigor, as well as a need to explore deeper and more complex problems.

BUTTER’s 2025 data demonstrated another sweeping change in the world of research: the rise of open science.

The proportion of open access peer-reviewed research sharply increased from 2021 to 2025. For example, in political science, just 24% of articles were open access in 2021. But in 2025, that figure nearly tripled to 69%. 

This change has been led by Europe, which has put out by far the biggest body of research on advancing open science and open access. Europe has a powerful open access movement, including organizations like Frontiers that are pushing the EU parliament to adapt policy that further proliferates open science.

Artificial Intelligence and LLMs Captivating Scientists

ChatGPT and LLMs have dominated the news cycle for the past two years. Within the research community, there has been a lot of public discussion about how scientists should and should not make use of these tools. LLM technology has also helped drive massive investments among companies.

It turns out that research on LLMs has seen similar growth. 2025 saw a record 6,668 peer-reviewed articles about GPT, other LLMs, and the technology writ-large.

Among these articles, some of the biggest sub-topics included education, medicine, and robotics. 

Research about artificial intelligence in general is also booming. The volume of published articles has more than doubled in the last five years.

Currently, China is the global leader in published AI research, although more and more countries are getting in on the AI research game year over year.

In the business world, companies are also going all-in on artificial intelligence technology, applying for and receiving patents at record rates. Samsung is by far the biggest achiever in the artificial intelligence patent space, but a number of companies including IBM, Microsoft, and Huawei also applied for or received over 100 AI patents in 2025. 

In terms of research topics outside of LLMs, the past few years have seen strong growth in AI medical and robotics research.

Some of the other hottest research topics within the AI world include sustainability, personalized medicine, and neural computation. These fields have gone from virtually zero coverage five years ago to thousands of peer-reviewed articles in 2025.

Drug development and clinical trials

Drug development is famously slowing down. Today, the average time-to-market for a new drug is 12 years, with failure rates as high as 90%. To make matters worse, average R&D costs of $1.1 billion twenty years ago have soared to $4.4 billion.

Accompanying these trends, data from NewsRx’s BUTTER platform shows that the number of clinical trials exploring drug development is slightly increasing year-over-year.

The U.S. dominates the world of drug development clinical trials. The U.S.’s share of this category of clinical research remains about double that of the next most productive regions, China and Europe.

In terms of the topics of these trials, five years ago—as one would expect—COVID-19 was the primary focus. As interest in COVID-19 has declined over the last five years, it has been replaced by clinical interest in AI and personalized medicine trials.

Sustainability Research

The climate crisis continues to advance at a rapid pace, with 2024 and 2025 likely to be history’s first years with a warming of greater than 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial averages.

The research world is moving to meet this moment. Sustainability experienced the most research attention it ever has this year, when there were 66,094 peer-reviewed articles on the topic.

Some of the major topics in sustainability research—as well as the ones experiencing the fastest rates of growth—include development, food and agriculture, climate change, and chemistry.

On the flip side, certain fields like environmental and sustainability economics and non-renewable energy studies have remained stagnant for the past five years.

Another important trend in the world of sustainability research is that Asia is king.

Led by China, Asian nations produce more sustainability research than Europe and North America combined. Africa is also becoming a major player, with more peer-reviewed articles coming out of the African continent than the U.K. for the first time in 2025.

Miscellaneous

The field of genetics has experienced an unusual path these last five years. Peer-reviewed studies on genetics declined significantly from 2021 to 2024 but saw a recovery in 2025.

One possible explanation is that COVID-19 disrupted genetics more than other adjacent fields. Another consideration is that in genetics, the bar has been raised for research significance over the past decade. Journal standards have evolved from “statistically significant association” to “mechanism, replication, functional validation, and population robustness,” a shift that may be increasing the cost per publishable paper.

Some of the major genetics research topics this past year include bioinformatics, gene therapy, and personalized medicine.

A bird’s eye view of the field of medicine does not reveal as many exciting changes. The number of peer-reviewed articles continues to grow at a slow but steady rate. Traditional sub-topics like cancer, public health, and veterinary medicine research seem to be experiencing steady and consistent scientific attention, but not as growing fields.

On an entirely different note, social media research is another field that has slowed down after a late 2010s and early 2020s boom. A look at research on different social media platforms demonstrates a sharp decline in research interest on X and Facebook, and a newfound rise of scientific articles studying TikTok.

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 into the world of science, research, and knowledge discovery.

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*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.