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Back when the world was young and Naturally Selected was not yet a month old, I analysed how long it took Faculty of 1000 members to evaluate papers after they’d been published. I found that about half of all the (first) evaluations go live within about a month of the original publication date. The mode of the (positively skewed) distribution is around 18 days. I haven’t had a look since, although my daily trawl through the evaluations in search for interesting content to share with you doesn’t give me reason to think it’s changed much.

This rapidity of evaluation is part and parcel of the value of F1000 to researchers. Obviously we can’t evaluate as soon as a paper is published, but we’re still pretty fast–fast enough to make F1000 a crucial part of your literature search strategy. And if you’ve already read a paper that has just been evaluated, then the chances are it’s still fresh in your mind and the evaluation text itself will add to, or maybe modify, your thoughts.

On the other hand, F1000 evaluations also go back a long way. Certain F1000 Members seem to delight in finding and bringing to our attention historical nuggets. Our first evaluation (at least, according to the user-facing browse page…) is this one on morpholino siRNA inhibition of zebrafish genes, back in 2000. “It really works!” evaluating Member Michael Brand said of this now-commonplace tool. But some Members have really looked peered into the mists of time, pulling out papers from the 1950s, the 1940s, and even from as far back as 1918. This last is from our old friend Björn Brembs, and has the remarkably modern-sounding titled The reactions to light and to gravity in Drosophila and its mutants, authored by Robert Stanly McEwen of Columbia University (the evaluation is free. Help yourself).

But the oldest evaluated paper by far is from 1866, the impressively titled Über die Erweiterung von Arterien in Folge einer. Which brings us back to where we came in today, as I wrote about it in August 2009, in the context of generating speediness statistics for Faculty of 1000.

And on that note, today is my last day in the office at Faculty of 1000. I’m moving on to pastures new, although I will probably still be contributing the odd post here. I’ll still be in London, and you can follow my continuing adventures at my personal blog and on twitter. It’s been a blast; thank you for sharing the journey with me.