By Nawsheen Boodhun, Assistant Editor BMC-series

2013 has seen more than 10,200 articles published across the BMC Series* journals. Now that 2014 is upon us, we thought it would be opportune to look back on some of our most-viewed articles of the past 12 months.

1.    Occupational issues of adults with ADHD (>44 200 Accesses)

Published in February 2013, this consensus development conference statement by Adamou and colleagues covers the impact of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) on employment. ADHD is a common childhood neurodevelopmental disorder which can persist into adulthood, often with profound negative effects on social interactions for sufferers, especially in the workplace. This consensus statement was developed as a result of an international conference held in July 2010 that covered a number of issues, including policy and decision making in regards to addressing the occupational impairments of individuals with ADHD.

2.    Identifying patients with diabetes and the earliest date of diagnosis in real time: an electronic health record case-finding algorithm (>44 000 Accesses)

This article was published in BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making in August 2013. The authors describe their efforts to develop and validate an automated, real-time diabetes case-finding algorithm to identify patients with diabetes at the earliest possible date based on data extracted from electronic health records. By analysing records from more than 160,000 patients from a large public hospital, they find that the model could identify patients with diabetes with 90% accuracy.

3.    A comparison of methods for differential expression analysis of RNA-seq data (>30700 Accesses)

Soneson and colleagues carried out an extensive comparison of eleven freely-available methods for differential expression analysis of RNA-seq data. Nine of the models work on the count data directly whilst the remaining two models transform the counts before applying a traditional method for differential expression analysis of microarray data. Using both simulated and experimental datasets, they find that no single method performs best under all circumstances, concluding that the optimum approach will depend on the specific characteristics of the dataset under investigation.

4.    Football Fans in Training: the development and optimization of an intervention delivered through professional sports clubs to help men lose weight, become more active and adopt healthier eating habits (>29 100 Accesses)

Obesity is a growing health problem. Despite the prevalence of obesity amongst men in the UK being amid the highest in Europe, they are less likely to engage in existing weight management programmes in comparison to women. In this paper by Gray and colleagues in BMC Public Health, the development and optimization of the “Football Fans in Training” programme is described. The aim of the programme is to aid overweight and obese men to lose weight by engaging in physical activity and adopting healthy eating habits. Participants of the 12-week pilot program engaged in ‘pitch-side’ activity sessions within Scottish Premier League football clubs, in an effort to provide a more gender-specific program.

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