2015 was a great year for publications in PeerJ and some of our articles made their way into various ‘highlights’ lists for the year. Here are a few that we spotted:
In June we published “Seven new microendemic species of Brachycephalus (Anura: Brachycephalidae) from southern Brazil” which reported on 7 new frog species and this finding was reported as one of the top 5 animal species discovered in 2015 by IBT.
We published a lot of great paleontology articles throughout 2015 and so we were pleased to see that of the 35 new dinosaur species named in 2015, two of them were published in PeerJ (and even better over half of them were open access!). The articles were “A specimen-level phylogenetic analysis and taxonomic revision of Diplodocidae (Dinosauria, Sauropoda)” (for Galeamopus) and “Cranial osteology of the ankylosaurian dinosaur formerly known as Minmi sp. (Ornithischia: Thyreophora) from the Lower Cretaceous Allaru Mudstone of Richmond, Queensland, Australia” (for Kunbarrasaurus). In addition, the second of those articles was used as an example of the “5 Trends That Will Be Bigger Than T. Rex” and two of our articles were listed in the “Top 5 Dinosaur Highlights of 2015” by the ‘New Views on Old Bones’ blog (being “The systematic relationships and biogeographic history of ornithischian dinosaurs” and of course the Brontosaurus article again).
In December, the altmetric service (which measures public engagement to science articles) released a roundup of the “Top 100 Articles of 2015” and again we were pleased to see two PeerJ articles appear on that list (“A specimen-level phylogenetic analysis and taxonomic revision of Diplodocidae (Dinosauria, Sauropoda)” at #55 and “Sizing ocean giants: patterns of intraspecific size variation in marine megafauna” at #72).
As to our own ‘top 10’ list – check out the blog post we made last week with our staff picks!