Pg10k

OK, it's cheating because the figure includes books as well as papers, but Postgenomic has now tracked more than ten thousand citations in blog posts. As the majority of blogs either (a) don't supply fulltext RSS feeds, just excerpts or (b) strip out HTML and thus the links from feeds there must be a sizeable dark figure, too - how many citations are being missed by Postgenomic and Chemical Blogspace, I wonder?

Anyway, paper #10,000 was Mauro Costa-Mattioli's paper in Cell about stress induced translation regulation (conveniently the citing post from Gene Expression explains what that is and then goes into some interesting detail - an excellent advert for science blogging).

I'm pleased. Scientists write blogs and put science in them. They talk about recent papers. Their numbers are growing. Might blog trackbacks be a good or even necessary supplement to comments on a paper on a journal website?

It'd be interesting to take, say, BioMedCentral papers from the past twelve months and compare the number of comments on each to the number of citations from posts. I think that BMC does comments quite well, possibly better than any other STM publisher - PLoS included - not that that's necessarily saying much (also there's still no comment RSS feed, boo). Using comment data from PLoS One would be another option (was speaking about this with a colleague earlier today) but considering how new PLoS One is perhaps there isn't enough data in Postgenomic yet for any results to be meaningful.

Actually, it'd also be interesting to compare the number of blog citations to the number of 'real' citations recieved by each paper in the index. Is blog buzz a good indicator of impact?

A brief stats update: the site has been running for about fourteen months. The most popular book has been The God Delusion, with relevant posts from 15 different blogs. The most popular 'proper' paper (anything with a DOI in PubMed gets tracked, which includes some opinion pieces) was Ben Voight's a map of recent positive selection in the human genome, from PLoS Biology.

There are 735 blogs in the index, of which 341 were active in the past week. Usually ~2,500 posts are aggregated each week (a major exception being the last two weeks of December, when this number falls to 1,400). There are ~120,000 blog posts in the database.

I've been busy with other projects at NPG recently but plan on spending some more time on Postgenomic over the next few months. If you've got any ideas (or you'd like to help out with coding, documentation, design - it's an open source project, born from discussions in the comment threads of bioinformatics blogs) then please let me know. If you're interested in using data from Postgenomic in some way then that's cool too, I'm keen to help.

I was going to reiterate my thanks to people who have contributed so far but the list is too long and I'd forget people. You know who you all are - ta muchly. Science bloggers rock.