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On day three of Science Foo Camp (scifoo) biologist Lincoln Stein (picture right) gave a presenation on what he calls "genome voyeurism", using Jim Watsons genome as an example. This session demonsrated the current and future possibilities of individuals having their own DNA sequenced, what has been called "personal genomics".

Not waving but drowning?

The 14th annual Nucleic Acids Research (NAR) database issue 2007 has just been published, open-access. This year is the largest yet (again) with 968 molecular biology databases listed, 110 more than the previous one (see figure below). In the world of biological databases, are we waving or drowning?

There are all sorts of flaws with using impact factors for judging the quality of biomedical research. Love them or hate them, just getting hold of impact factors for journals in bioinformatics and related fields is much harder than it should be, so I thought I'd reproduce some statistics I gathered here. The rankings, which you should use with caution [1,2], are the latest as of June 2006 (and apply to citations in 2005) courtesy of Journal Citation Reports®, part of Thomson ISI Web of Knowledge. JCR has a pretty horrible clunky web interface when compared to some of its rivals [3,4], maybe one day they'll make it better. Anyway, this is not a comprehensive list, just a fairly random selection of bioinformatics and computer science journals that publish articles I've been reading the last few years.