In January, a research team including University Distinguished Professor Kim Lewis and Distinguished Professor Slava Epstein presented a newly discovered antibiotic that eliminates pathogens without encountering any detectable resistance. The groundbreaking research swept the globe, and now one analysis indicates that the paper topped the list of the 100 scientific articles receiving the most media buzz and online attention in 2015.
The paper, published in the journal Nature, scored the most attention this year from mainstream media as well as blogs and social media, according to Altmetric, a London-based startup that tracks and analyzes the online activity of scholarly literature. Earlier this week, Altmetric shared its top 100 list of most shared and discussed academic research articles of the year.
“We didn’t quite anticipate the media frenzy around the paper,” co-author Brian Conlon, a microbiologist at Northeastern, told Science. “It’s certainly a strange experience to see a photograph of bacterial cultures you took in the lab appear on the CBS evening news.”
