Unfortunately i fail to understand what you mean by "trendy molecules" and "sifting technique" so i would really appreciate if you can elaborate.
Let me try to explain what Prof Edwards means by trendy research (= fashionable scientific ideas in circulation, that hold scientists' attention during certain decades or eras, but which often turn out to be wrong).
Let's take a disease like peptic ulcers (eg stomach ulcers). In 1874, Arther Boettcher published a study detailing a small curved bacterium that he repeatedly found in stomach ulcers (we now know this bacterium was Helicobacter pylori). Over the next 50 years from 1874 onwards, other scientists confirmed Boettcher's findings. By the late 1940s, peptic ulcers were successfully being treated with antibiotics in New York City hospitals, and stomach ulcers were at that time considered to be an infectious disease, at least in New York.
Then in the 1950s, discussions of infectious causation of peptic ulcers disappeared from the medical literature and disappeared from the treatment regimen. From the 1950s to the early 1990s, the medical texts forgot about the infectious theory of peptic ulcers, and instead attributed peptic ulcers to excess stomach acid, stress, smoking, alcohol — but not to bacterial infection.
So for some unknown reason, from the 1950s onwards, medical and scientific fashions changed, and suddenly bacterial causes of peptic ulcers were out of fashion, and stomach acidity etc became the fashionable hypothesis to explain peptic ulcers. So antibiotics were no longer used to treat ulcers, and antacids were given instead (which did not help this disease).
Then famously in 1984, in a courageous self-experiment, Dr Barry Marshall drank an infectious broth of Helicobacter pylori, as he theorized that this bacterium was the cause of peptic ulcers (interestingly he had not heard of Boettcher's work). Drinking this infectious broth rapidly led to gastritis of Marshall's stomach, and this self-experiment then paved the way to the modern understanding that Helicobacter pylori is a major cause of peptic ulcers. As a result, from the early 1990s onwards, medical thinking returned to Arther Boettcher's original explanation of a bacterial cause of peptic ulcers.
These days we understand that stomach acid is not a cause of peptic ulcers, and that the major causal factors are Helicobacter pylori and NSAIDS, with tobacco smoking and stress due to serious illness being minor causes (this is according to
Wikipedia).
(Source for the above info:
Plague Time: The New Germ Theory of Disease by Paul W. Ewald. Page 99)
So, if you were to run your algorithm on peptic ulcers studies, but restricting the algorithm to papers published before Dr Barry Marshall's famous experiment in 1984 (in other words, run your algorithm as if we were back in 1984), I would guess that your algorithm would provide a strong link to stomach acid as a suspected cause of peptic ulcers (which we now know to be wrong), because for four decades, from the 1950s to the early 1990s, the excess stomach acid hypothesis was the main fashion in medical thinking about ulcers.