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Books and Writing – Page 4

MassGenomics

Medical genomics in the post-genome era

Genomics Bloggers Meet at AGBT

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One of my favorite parts of AGBT was the blogger’s luncheon, in which four of us from the genomics blogging community got together to talk shop.  We had Daniel MacArthur of Genetic Future, Anthony Fejes of Fejes.ca, David Dooling of PolITigenomics, and me, Dan Koboldt of MassGenomics.

Daniel MacArthur (Genetic Future), Anthony Fejes (Fejes.ca), Dan Koboldt (MassGenomics), and David Dooling (Politigenomics)

BLOGGERS AT AGBT

It was an impromptu but very enjoyable meeting where I learned that I’m probably the least serious about all of this blogging. We all agreed that Daniel MacArthur is the most prolific among us, and as I found out in the course of AGBT, he’s probably the most well known as well.  He and David Dooling had an intimate knowledge of their blog statistics and readership.  I have much to learn in that vein.

Anthony Fejes of the self-titled Fejes.ca began his efforts not to blog about genomics, but actually photography, a keen interest of his.  David Dooling, of course, covers three areas that gave the title to his blog: Politics, IT, Genomics.

All friendly competitions aside, I was intrigued to learn that we all face similar challenges.  Perhaps foremost among them is knowing just how much or how little to say about the work that we’re doing.  We are all scientists, of course, and thus keen to share knowledge with others.  Yet we do work in a competitive field, one in which there are never as many grants as grantees, never as many publications as submitted manuscripts.

Fortunately, at our little roundtable, there were no adversaries for the NIH budget – Dooling and I work together, Fejes is in Canada, and MacArthur is on the other side of the Atlantic.  For that reason, perhaps, we could talk openly, learn from one another, and finally, put a face to the names we already knew so well.

Genomics-related journals by impact factor

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Looking ahead for 2009, I’ve already established that publication will be one of my highest priorities.  To motivate myself, I updated my list of top journals for genomics, ranked them by their most recent impact factor (2007), then printed it out and taped it on a cabinet right in front of me.

When I was taping it on top of my older (2004?) list, I happened to notice some interesting changes in impact factor over the past few years.  First, I saw that Nature has finally surpassed Science by impact factor (28.75 compared to 26.37).  I used to get Science in print and like its format, but ironically, the big publications on my CV are all in Nature.  AAAS had better watch out, because Nature Genetics, which I consider the top journal for our field, has moved to within striking distance (24.18 to 25.56).

Next, I was pleased to see open access journals moving up in the ranks, particularly PLoS Genetics (from 7.67 to 8.72) and BMC Genomics (4.03 to 4.18).  I noted that the American Journal of Human Genetics (11.09) is still thrashing the European Journal of Human Genetics (4.00). I was disappointed at a slight drop for Human Mutation (6.47 to 6.27), since they published my inaugural first-author paper (don’t worry HuMu, I still love ya!).

Consistently moving up were Pharmacogenetics and Genomics (5.39 to 5.78) and Pharmacogenomics Journal (3.96 to 4.97), a reflection, perhaps, of the growing interest in personalized medicine.

Just for fun, I took the publications from my own CV and looked at the impact factors of journals where they were published (Nature, PLoS Biology, Human Mutation, J. of Infectious Diseases, and Genomics).  It seems my average career impact factor is 19.24.  Not too shabby!