blog

One of the things that came out of Liz Allen’s paper on expert review and bibliometrics in PLoS ONE last year was that we at F1000 often ‘miss’ highly-cited papers. Some people appear to think that this means “post-publication peer review” (PPPR) is spotty and unreliable, and while we may indeed miss some papers, especially in fields where our Faculty coverage is weak, I suspect a lot of the criticism comes from not really understanding the nature of our type of PPPR, or maybe failing to grasp that some highly-cited papers aren’t necessarily all that insightful.

For example, genome papers might well be useful for gathering citations, but the main value of such work is in the accompanying dataset. Unless the genome sequence itself points to something new or unexpected, we might expect it not to be featured in F1000. However, this week we published an evaluation of a paper demonstrating the reach of plant genetic research; the first draft genome of the domesticated apple¹ (Golden Delicious, in this case) gives us clues about how apples evolved from a 9-chromosome ancestor to the current 17-chromosome plant, and which genes were selected during domestication.

A slightly older paper caught the eye of one of our Faculty. The intriguingly titled The common patterns of nature² how patterns (examples given include species’ abundance distributions, age of onset of disease, rates of amino acid substitutions) arise from simple constraints:

this paper is essential reading material for all biologists who are interested in describing large-scale patterns that arise from interactions between small-scale processes.

Beware, though: there’s a lot of math in the paper.

One of the problems in drug discovery is predicting how the compound you’re using for pharmacologic effect will be eliminated from the body when its work is done