Category Archives: 2012

Thanking Our Peer Reviewers

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What a year it has been! As 2013 commences we would like to take a moment to recognize the peer reviewers that made the previous year possible. In 2012 over 60,000 people reviewed for PLOS ONE, up from 38,400 in 2011. These thousands of generous individuals donated their time to assessing and improving our authors’ submissions. Their combined efforts have helped PLOS ONE publish over 23,000 articles this year and added a vast wealth of knowledge to the Open Access corpus. We here at PLOS ONE would like to give thanks to these amazing individuals. Without their critical insight, support, and hard work we couldn’t do what we do.

Though we are unable to mention each individual by name here, we would like to tell you more about the PLOS ONE reviewer board as a whole. Our reviewers come from 154 countries, from Albania to Argentina and Mexico to Monaco. 26,749 reviewers submitted 2 or more reviews in 2012.

As in previous years, we can also provide a list of the Top 25 institutions whose members contributed reviews last year. They are, in no particular order:

  • Duke University
  • Baylor College of Medicine
  • University of Michigan
  • INSERM
  • University of Pittsburgh
  • University of Washington
  • Stanford University
  • University of Florida
  • CNRS
  • University of Oxford
  • University of Cambridge
  • Vanderbilt University
  • University of Minnesota
  • Imperial College London
  • University of Pennsylvania
  • Harvard Medical School
  • University of Toronto
  • University of Alabama
  • University College London
  • Mayo Clinic
  • NIH
  • Emory University
  • University of British Columbia
  • Johns Hopkins University
  • Karolinska Institutet

Again, we would like to send a hearty thank you to the over 60,000 peer reviewers of 2012. We are enormously grateful for your contributions and will look forward to working with you in the New Year!

Image: Thank You by mandiberg.

PLOS ONE Papers of 2012

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As we start off the New Year, we wanted to take a quick moment and highlight a few noteworthy papers published in 2012. Of the 23,468 papers published last year, five are already in the top 12 most viewed PLOS papers to date. Although they may not have gotten the press coverage of those listed in our 2012 Media Round-Up, Article Level Metrics reveal they’ve certainly received a lot of attention.

Published just over three months ago, a study showing that withdrawal symptoms of marijuana can be similar to those of tobacco is the third most highly viewed article published by any PLOS journal. With 227,928 total article views since publication on September 26, 2012 it’s only a few thousand views short of the top two articles published in 2008 and 2009. Other highly viewed ONE articles from 2012 include a study of genetic alterations in a line of flies reared in the dark (197,150 views since publication in March), the ecosystem implications of an invasive species (174,742 total article views, published September), an experiment depicted in Figure 3 to the right in immersive virtual reality between rats and humans (139,683 total article views, published in October), and a comparison of Westerners energetics with those of a hunter-gatherer society (102,167 total article views, published in July).

2012 also brought several papers describing new species, one of which was recognized as the “Best new species that was hiding in plain sight” by Jason G. Goldman of Scientific American. Other papers of note questioned beliefs about the limitations of alternative agriculture and challenged trusted measurements such as the Body Mass Index, commonly used to determine obesity rates.

Several more papers could even help support or inspire your New Year’s Resolutions. Whether it is to spend more time outdoors, watch what you eat, lose weight or conquer your fears, ONE has published research to help motivate those resolutions.

2012 was a year of growth and innovation for PLOS ONE, here’s looking forward to another great year!