We started Haldane’s Sieve back in August 2012 to promote a preprint culture in evolutionary genetics (see here for more details). Since starting we’ve had ~150 posts, the vast majority of which have been preprint abstracts. We’ve had over 30,000 views from all over the world. During this time we’ve also seen more journals adopting favorable policies towards preprints, in particular Genetics and Genome Research, reflecting a growing recognition that preprint archives are a natural stage in the publication process. Overall it has been great to see the support for Haldane’s Sieve from so many people; we hope that it, and preprints more generally, will go from strength to strength in 2013.

Below are our top 10 most viewed pages of 2012. Each one of these has received hundreds of views. One noticeable trend is that many of them are the “Our paper” posts, which suggests that writing a blurb about your paper for Haldane’s Sieve is a great way to bring it more attention. Let us know if you want to write a post on your preprint article, or a quick post on a preprint you’ve enjoyed.

1. Horizontal gene transfer may explain variation in θs. Maddamsetti et al. respond to a recent paper by Martincorena et al. The attention garnered by this post is undoubtedly due to its lively comment section. Martincorena et al. themselves responded with a pre-print here.
2. Our paper: The genetic prehistory of southern Africa. Pickrell et al. write about their preprint. Their published paper is out at Nature Communications.
3. Thoughts on: Finding the sources of missing heritability in a yeast cross. Joe Pickrell’s post about Bloom et al.
4. Our paper: The geography of recent genetic ancestry across Europe. Peter Ralph and Graham Coop write about their arXived paper.
5. Thoughts on: The date of interbreeding between Neandertals and modern humans. Graham Coop’s post on Sankararaman et al.’s paper. The authors’ post on their paper (Our paper: The date of interbreeding between Neandertals and modern humans) also made our top 10. The paper was published in PLoS Genetics.
6. Our paper: Population genomics of the Wolbachia endosymbiont in Drosophila melanogaster. Casey Bergman’s post on his group’s paper by Richardson et al. The paper was published in PLoS Genetics.
7. Our paper: A genetic variant near olfactory receptor genes influences cilantro preference. Nick Eriksson’s post about 23andMe’s preprint. The paper appeared in Flavour.
8. Species Identification and Unbiased Profiling of Complex Microbial Communities Using Shotgun Illumina Sequencing of 16S rRNA Amplicon Sequences. Ong et al.
9. Our paper: Population genomics of sub-Saharan Drosophila melanogaster: African diversity and non-African admixture. John Pool’s post on Pool et al. The paper appeared in PLoS Genetics.
10. Blood ties: ABO is a trans-species polymorphism in primates . Ségurel et al.’s paper which Laure Ségurel posted about here. The paper came out in PNAS.