Whenever I lack for inspiration for a blog post, or whenever we need a pick-me-up in the form of evidence that our work is being used, I fire off an update of our usage metrics. Yesterday, I ran an update of the Gene Wiki stats.
For the month of January 2010:
- The 9860 Gene Wiki pages were viewed 3,016,227 times.
- 91% of Gene Wiki pages are in the top 8 Google results when searching by gene symbol (43% are the top hit).
- A total of 949 human edits were performed by 346 unique editors.
- An additional 115 edits were performed by bots.
- Total text content grew by 121 kilobytes, approximately equal to one PLoS Biology article.
- Total text content now stands at 69.73 megabytes, approximately equal to 575 PLoS Biology articles (slightly more than were actually published in PLoS Biology in 2008 and 2009)
I’ve uploaded the full statistics if anyone would like to see.
That completes today’s navel gazing session….
Hi Andrew,
Thanks for the interesting stats! I appreciate how open everyone at BioGPS is with information and methodology.
Do you track how the GeneWiki stats correlate with data viewed and downloaded from the BioGPS portal? For example, does the high number of page-views for insulin translate to a relatively high number of insulin gene lookups? Or are the GeneWiki stats usually poor predictors of the corresponding gene data stats?
Thanks!
Karmel
Hi Karmel,
Interesting analysis we hadn't thought of. My guess is that they are generally rather loosely correlated. The Gene Wiki is more biased toward a non-science readership, while BioGPS is definitely targeting scientists.
Also, we've avoided doing much mining of specific gene pages users are looking at. Just in case someone is using BioGPS heavily to learn about the hot novel gene they're studying, we'd hate to splash that hint on the front page of the blog.
But, since you asked, I scanned through the most popular gene pages and there are certainly genes there that one might expect. For example, EGFR, GAPDH, p53, actin, PPARG, and MYC are all among the top 10 accessed pages.
Cheers,
-andrew