Microplastics: 100 Citation Celebration
July 15th
It’s been a while since my last post. I’ve been waiting for my article Microplastics in a Freshwater Environment Receiving Treated Wastewater Effluent (full article here if you want to read it) to go from 99 to 100 citations (according to google scholar). I’ve been waiting 5 weeks and it still hasn’t happened… but in the meantime I submitted a new article for publication. I’ll talk more about that when and if it gets published… I think it will ruffle some feathers.
100 citations puts a manuscript in the top 2 – 5% of all papers ever published (depending on the citation calculator) which sounds pretty good, and it is, but there have been a lot of articles published and half of them have not be cited by anyone other than the authors. Many scientists end up with multiple publications with more than 100 citations over their career.
So on to the paper. “Microplastics in a freshwater environment receiving treated wastewater effluent” was the first paper I wrote and the first paper I was included in the authorship. Those two points sound redundant, but people who contribute significantly to a research project will often be included in the authorship of a manuscript even if they did not do any of the writing. And, well, they should be. I was the first author on the manuscript, meaning I did the bulk of the work and writing for the paper. Todd, my grad school advisor, and I came up with the idea for the project after talking to Jeremy Conkle of Texas A&M Corpus Christi (lucky bugger) at a toxicology conference. Jeremy researched microplastics in the Gulf of Mexico, and, well, Todd and I simultaneously came up with the idea of looking for microplastics in a few of the lakes in Lubbock while listening to Jeremy’s talk. So, after the conference, Jeremy sent me the NOAA’s technique for measuring microplastics in surface water and we were off.
The lakes in Lubbock (other than the lake at the Lubbock Lake landmark) are all man-made. Lubbock also has several playas, which are temporary bodies of water. The man-made lake chain in the city is fed with water pumped from a perched aquifer under the town. This perched aquifer is renewed by land application of municipal wastewater from the city’s water treatment plant.
We collected surface water from several locations down this chain of lakes and a few of the city’s playas over a year. Sample collection involved me driving around with a helper, most often Will or Seeni, and me shoving my hands in water that people weren’t allowed to swim in. The water samples were collected with 4-liter bottles and fed through a series of micrometer sieves. Plastics of varying sizes were collected by these sieves, the plastics were cooked in an oven (to evaporate any water), and then weighed.
taken from https://caseagrant.ucsd.edu/
So a little bit on microplastics. Microplastics come in two types. “Primary microplastics”, which are microplastics intentionally made and placed in products. “microbeads” in lotions are kind of the quintennial example of primary microplastics. This type of microplastic has mostly been phased out, but, when I conducted this research 5-6 years ago, the amount of plastic I found in a lotion (that will remain unnamed) was shocking (520 mg in 100 g of lotion). “Secondary microplastics” are microplastics that fragment off of larger plastic products. Secondary microplastics are produced by the degradation of all things made of plastic. Clothing, bottles, packaging, components… all of it. There are multiple ways to qualify the types, we used magnified sight. Primary microplastics usually look like round beads, and secondary microplastics usually look like jagged pieces and filaments.
Back to the study. Well, we found microplastics… basically everywhere we sampled. In generally, most of what we found were secondary microplastics. The water directly aquifer that fed the lakes appeared to have exclusively secondary microplastics in it. All other sampling locations had greater fractions of primary microplastics. As I said before, this identification was done by sight, so it would be considered qualitative and not quantitative. Meaning it was a documented phenomenon, but not something we could attach a number to.
Most of the citations of the paper are for finding microplastics in urban lakes and/or lakes fed by waste water. A couple cited that we found microplastics in an aquifer. In fact, this study is the first to do so. Jessica, Will, Fa, John, Seeni, Audra, Todd, and I hold the title of being the first people to find microplastics in an aquifer.
I hope you enjoyed this run down of my first paper. I’m planning to do this for my other works in the future, all of which were far more complex, time consuming, and have all been cited less… go figure.