[azakai]

I'm skeptical of the article's point, but I think it does try to answer this question of yours:

> Does gain of function research yield more high impact papers than more benign types of virology research? The article seems to suggest so, but provides no citations indicating that.

The article's argument is that gain-of-function research moves the researcher from the set of existing viruses to the set of all the viruses we can create - a far, far larger set, and hence one that allows more publications. Or, to put it another way, after you've run out of viruses to find, and things to publish about them, creating more gives you many more papers to write.

There may be something to that argument, but I still agree with your general point that the article needs more evidence.