Writing good software can have more impact than publishing in high impact journals for genomic statisticians

Rafael Irizarry
2014-04-07

Every once in a while we see computational papers published in science journals with high impact factors.  Genomics related methods appear quite often in these journals. Several of my junior colleagues express frustration that all their papers get rejected from these journals. I tell them that the same is true for most of my papers and remind them of these examples:

Method Journal Year #Citations
PLINK AJHG 2007 6481
Bioconductor Genome Biology 2004 5973
RMA Biostatistics 2003 5674
limma SAGMB 2004 5637
quantile normalization Bioinformatics 2003 4646
Bowtie Genome Biology 2009 3849
BWA Bioinformatics 2009 3327
Loess normalization NAR 2002 3313
qvalues JRSS-B 2002 2758
tophat Bioinformatics 2008 1868
vsn Bioinformatics 2002 1398
GCRMA JASA 2004 1397
MACS Genome Biology 2008 1277
deseq Genome Biology 2010 1264
CBS Biostatistics 2004 1051
R/qtl Bioinformatics 2003 1027

Let me know of other examples in the comments.

update: I added one more to the list.