The BMC-series 2012 in review: Top 5

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It’s a tough ask summarising a whole year in a single blog post. So, to save you having to read every single one of the 9611-or-so articles published in the subject-specific journals of the BMC-series*, we’ve gone and distilled the very best-of-the-best from what’s been happening in biology and medicine across all 62 journals over the past year. And over the coming week, we’ll be posting a new update every day. See, aren’t we good to you?

Top 5

No review of the year would be complete without a pop-tastic rundown of the most popular articles from the last 12 months. Notwithstanding that articles published earlier in the year are more likely to be viewed more often, here are our most highly accessed articles from 2012:

1. The weight of nations: an estimation of adult human biomass (>73,500 accesses)

The most viewed article from 2012 also makes it into the top 100 articles published by BioMed Central of all time, and is the 11th most-viewed article in the BMC-series of all time. Sarah Walpole and colleague’s study attempted to estimate how much the total human population on earth weighed – and just how much of this was down to obesity.

Their ambitious global study was reported throughout the world, and currently holds the BMC-series record as the most widely discussed article published in the series. Why not find out for yourself where you are on the Global Fat Scale?

2. A tale of three next generation sequencing platforms: comparison of Ion Torrent, Pacific Biosciences and Illumina MiSeq sequencers (>31,000 accesses)

Michael Quail and colleagues from the UK’s Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute present a timely comparison of three major new next-generation sequencing platforms released in 2011, and evaluate the pros and cons of each.

3. Genetic variants associated with breast size also influence breast cancer risk (>20,400 accesses)

Published in June in BMC Medical Genetics, this study from researchers at 23andMe, Inc. in California investigated the genetic factors underlying breast size, and show that some of these factors are shared with breast cancer risk.

4. Cloud BioLinux: pre-configured and on-demand bioinformatics computing for the genomics community (>18,900 accesses)

Cloud_supertin Flickr ccThis new piece of software aimed to bridge the gap between the rapid accumulation of next-generation sequencing data and access to the vast computational resources needed to analyse it, by flying freely available tools into the cloud.

5. A ‘snip’ in time: what is the best age to circumcise? (>15,600 accesses)

In this Debate article published in BMC Pediatrics, an international collaboration of authors from the US, UK and Australia put forward their argument that infancy represents a ‘window of opportunity’ in which safe and convenient male circumcision can be performed, in order to reduce the risk of common infections and some cancers.

*Not including our flagship journals BMC Biology and BMC Medicine, and supplements journal BMC Proceedings

 

Next up: The year in Biology

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