Please stop justifying the "growing interest" in the field with a pubmed search. It's hard to find a keyword where there ISN'T an increase in papers. Here's e.g."banana".

I award a virtual banana for anyone who can show me a keyword for which the plot shows the reverse pattern.

My twitter likes have long surpassed the Pubmed hits for "twitter likes".

Good morning - I woke up to a tweet that went bananas over night. A short follow-up.

Some people rightly pointed out that bananas actually ARE an important research field (nutrition in developing countries, serious diseases of bananas ...). So, yes, my example wasn't ideal.
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Gotta be honest here, I just typed in the first random word that came to my mind. As an ignorant neuroscientist, I didn't know that Pubmed's description ("biomedical literature" and "life science") also extends to plants. (Yes, I know that plants live.)
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Even though I appreciate bananas more now (still won't eat them, though), the problem still stands: Search hits are useless if not normalised. Do bananas see the increase in research they deserve? We won't know if we don't correct for the number of papers in plant science.
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There might even be an increase in banana research. Or your favourite field. I just don't believe it's that steep. As long as things like phrenology look like this, leave me alone with your raw numbers.

That's all, folks. Please don't place banana skins in front of my door.
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