Numbers employed to determine a scientist’s career have always seemed dodgy. Just ask Eugene Garfield, creator of the citation index and the impact factor, who has written, “The use of journal impacts in evaluating individuals has its inherent dangers.” Yet where movies, novels, and scientific articles are concerned, I’m a sucker for rankings. I could easily spend a weekend checking out the New York Times’ best-ever films, Modern Library’s top 100 novels, and F1000’s top-ranked articles.
Since it’s unlikely you’re here to read about favorite novels and movies, I’ll focus on the highest-rated article since F1000’s inception: “Genome-wide non-mendelian inheritance of extra-genomic information in Arabidopsis” (Lolle et al., Nature, 2005), with an F1000 Article Factor (FFa) of 62, and a record 20 Faculty evaluations. On our newly renovated Web site (f1000.com), you’ll also see a dissenting evaluation and two further comments from the Faculty on the controversial “hothead phenomenon,” involving ...
