How to find the best papers to read is tough

We've all been there: PubMed returns over 2500 RNA-seq papers, and there's still 800 left when you only search the title! How do you find the best papers to read? PubMed can help a little more with your quest to find out more about RNA-seq as there are just 19 reviews, but it's often primary papers you need to dig into to truly understand what's going on in a field. There are other ways to find out what's a hot paper and I've just started using a relatively new one: the Altmetric explorer.

Before I go any further I will say this is a demo account (thanks Altmetric) and their pricing plans are squarely aimed at institutions. Hopefully they'll find a way to make tools for individuals with perhaps more limited search functionality.

What does Altmetric Explorer do: The search tool allows you to filter the vast amount of data Altmetric has collected, you can even enter a PubMed search directly. The first thing I did was to look at was my own publication record and see who's talking about the papers I've co-authored, turns out it is often just me (as far as Altmetric is concerned)!

I'd originally been in touch with the Altmetric team about using data from ORCID (I wrote about this last year) and seeing if it were possible to pull out more complex relationships between authors. The aim was to make creation of something like the Circos plot below easy to do for any group of individuals ro even institutes. I'm still a long way from doing this but if anyone can offer some help that would be great!

The searches I presented below simply used a PubMed search and list papers in the order of most activity, as recorded by Altmetric. You can filter on lots of other metrics including; keyword, date, journal, etc. Take a look and get in tocuh with the Altmetric team if you'd like to do more.

RNA-seq Altmetric activity:

ChIP-seq Altmetric activity:

My Altmetric activity:

PubMed = Hadfield J[author]