The Top PeerJ Articles of 2015

As 2015 draws to a close, please join us as we review some of ‘top’ articles from 2015. A list like this is always going to be subjective, however, in order of ‘publication date’ here are our Staff Picks for the 10 most significant and interesting articles we published in 2015.

Most significant articles in 2015 (PeerJ or PeerJ Computer Science)

Sizing ocean giants: patterns of intraspecific size variation in marine megafauna
A comprehensive listing of the largest sizes reached by various marine organisms. Find out which are the largest creatures in the ocean.

A specimen-level phylogenetic analysis and taxonomic revision of Diplodocidae (Dinosauria, Sauropoda)
A 300 page study which, among other things, reinstated ‘Brontosaurus’ as a valid name.

Neonicotinoids impact bumblebee colony fitness in the field; a reanalysis of the UK’s Food & Environment Research Agency 2012 experiment
A study which re-analysed public data to come to an important and contradictory conclusion about bees and pesticide use.

Swabs to genomes: a comprehensive workflow
An extremely useful toolset to empower a lab, or even a classroom with limited resources, to sequence, assemble, and analyse microbial genomes.

More ties than we thought [PeerJ Computer Science]
A fun study with implications for formal computational languages. It found that there are more than 260,000 ways to tie a neck-tie!

Navigating the massive world of reddit: using backbone networks to map user interests in social media [PeerJ Computer Science]
A study analyzing the makeup of reddit user groups. Discover which topic areas are related to which!

Seven new microendemic species of Brachycephalus (Anura: Brachycephalidae) from southern Brazil
Researchers discovered 7 entirely new frog species living on 7 different Brazilian mountains, giving rise to several headlines playing on the movie “7 brides for 7 brothers.”

Compact graphical representation of phylogenetic data and metadata with GraPhlAn
A new tool to create high-quality, compact visualizations of large-scale microbial genomes and metagenomes.

Humans differ in their personal microbial cloud
A study which shows that people emit unique microbial communities into their surrounding environment, potentially allowing for identification of individuals.

Gluten-free food database: the nutritional quality and cost of packaged gluten-free foods
A study which provides data about the cost and nutritional quality of gluten free food.

And, be sure to check out the various ‘top 10’ Collections per subject area, which we also compiled throughout the year.

Most cited PeerJ articles (all-time)

Of course, citations take time to accrue, and so our top 5 cited articles, of all-time, are currently:

PhyloSift: phylogenetic analysis of genomes and metagenomes (48 citations)

Poppr: an R package for genetic analysis of populations with clonal, partially clonal, and/or sexual reproduction (39 citations)

Data reuse and the open data citation advantage (32 citations)

On the reproducibility of science: unique identification of research resources in the biomedical literature (29 citations)

System wide analyses have underestimated protein abundances and the importance of transcription in mammals (28 citations)

In the Top 100 of all publications

We were also pleased to see two PeerJ articles (“ Sizing ocean giants ” and “ A specimen-level phylogenetic analysis and taxonomic revision of Diplodocidae ”) appearing in the “Top 100 science articles” of the year, as measured by the AltMetric service . To put that into perspective, remember that PeerJ started publishing less than three years ago, which makes the appearance of PeerJ amongst dozens of well-established journals on that list an amazing accomplishment.

So we had a great year at PeerJ and we published some amazing science. We look forward to 2016 – and we hope that you will send us your upcoming articles!

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