Hello and welcome back to Backchat. If the Nature podcast is that eager student who sits in the front row and is always the one with the first question, then Backchat is the dorm room slacker who's forgotten where the lecture theatre is. Yes, like the prodigal son that you didn't even notice was gone, Backchat has returned for an end of the year special. Today's roundtable

chit chat will look at papers with no citations and why talking about physics can be a bit

of a turn-off. Plus, because it's 2017, I'm afraid we're not going to be able to avoid the Donald.

I'm Adam Levy and chatting back with me in the studio

today are Lizzie Gibney. Hi Adam, I'm Lizzie. I'm a physical sciences reporter here in London.

Richard Van Norton. Hello, I edit features for nature from London. And on the line from

Washington, D.C. we have Lauren Morello. Hey, I edit news from North and South America.

Coming up in the show, we'll be talking about the papers that literally no one is talking

about, papers with zero citations.

Do they show that academia is just shouting into the void, or is there zero reason to worry

about them?

We'll also be looking at the year of Donald Trump, how has America's new president shifted expectations of science

in the US, and how do we cover politics when there's more happening every day than typically

happened in an average year? Finally, we'll be asking a question very close to my physics heart.

Is physics cool?

Or are the only people who care about penta quarks?

Penta dorks?

Are physics stories harder to write and harder to get audiences to read?

If so, why?

Now, firstly, Richard, you've just written a feature all about zero citation papers.

Just to be absolutely clear, what do we mean when we say a paper has zero citations?

Yeah, we mean this curious situation where a scientific research paper has never been cited, never mentioned in the reference list of another peer-reviewed paper. So you might think that's quite rare and quite weird,

...