Illustration: Bodara

of medical articles contain findings about different categories of disease from what their authors originally intended. This is the conclusion of a study on unexpected research results that has been published in the journal Research Policy. Its authors compared the categories of more than 1.2 million articles with over 90,000 funding applications that had been submitted to the US National Institutes of Health from 2008 to 2016. Applied research contained slightly fewer unexpected findings than basic research, while calls for proposals relating to specific topics resulted in more unexpected findings than was the case from open calls.