Radiation-eating fungi beat vacuum-cleaner dinos and Steve’s crocs

Recent discussions about potential use of downloads in place of other bibliometric measures (including Impact Factor) made us think. So, we took a look at PLoS ONE stats to see which papers are the most visited to date. The results are here – the most visited ONE paper is Ionizing Radiation Changes the Electronic Properties of Melanin and Enhances the Growth of Melanized Fungi, which got quite a lot of coverage in the media and on blogs (including BoingBoing, Slashdot, Rhosgobel, to point to just a few) when it first came out a year ago.
In second place is Paul Sereno’s Structural Extremes in a Cretaceous Dinosaur (you can get the taste for the media and blog coverage at the bottom of this post), as you may have expected.
The Top 5 also include: Resistance Exercise Reverses Aging in Human Skeletal Muscle by Melov et al., Intense Sweetness Surpasses Cocaine Reward by Lenoir et al., and the late Steve Irwin’s last paper, Satellite Tracking Reveals Long Distance Coastal Travel and Homing by Translocated Estuarine Crocodiles, Crocodylus porosus.
This was not downloads but traffic, but still, it is an interesting result to ponder….Perhaps those papers that have cool pictures can skew the numbers!