Sometime last night this blog received its 50,000th page view. I write this blog because I like to. That others find the content worth reading at times is lovely, thank you.
What has been read the most and the least?
Post views are not entirely reliable, because I leave the entire post up until the next one, and only then put in a “more” which forces the reader to open the post. So people landing on my blog often only trigger the “Home page/archives” target. Given this caveat, and if I remove posts that are announcements of seminars, etc., the least viewed post is “In praise of the NHS”.
As this is election year, my post may be worth publicising heavily. The NHS is extraordinarily effective and from all the evidence I have seen (note “evidence”, not opinion) it beats the hell out of all other systems, so well worth fighting for.
My all too brief post on “Klotho paper” is the second least viewed. This is a subject I will be returning to, as the paper provides evidence for a primordial link between ligands involved in animal development (morphogens, growth factors, et al.) and those that have hormonal activity, involved in the regulation of physiology.
The most viewed? “An Open Letter to Dr Worms, ESF”
Did he ever formally apologise? I do not recall that he did. He should and so should the ESF.
Runner up is “Responses to evidence of self-plagiarism“, which recounts how journals responded to the fact that data had been re-used in a number of Fancesco Stellacci’s papers on nanoparticles, in some instances to describe different experiments.
Now that PubPeer is running and people increasingly aware of it, and a most useful “selection” of PubPeer commentaries provided at Retraction Watch, as part of their weekend reading list, the poor response noted in my post is something I hope we are moving away from, albeit slowly.