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Excuse me while I indulge in some shameless company promotion here.

Scientific research is a pretty fast-moving place to be. In some places I’ve worked in there were unofficial competitions to notice a hot paper and send it round to your colleagues. Not sure what the prize was, to be honest: a golden computer mouse or something.

Seriously, if there’s hot news, you want to hear about it pretty quickly. Especially if it’s directly related to your own research. So one of the potential criticisms of F1000 is that there is a delay between research being published and you hearing about it. That’s pretty fair actually: someone has to read the paper, write about it; then our editorial team have to check it over and then it gets published to the website.

But how long does that all take? It’s reasonably difficult to get real numbers retrospectively, but I had a go.

These are pretty interesting data. First, it looks like we’re publishing evaluations before the papers themselves are published. This is simply because we had to take the publication dates as given by PubMed and sometimes (ofttimes?) the publication date is after the actual date the article was published for real.

The main point however is that we publish the first evaluation of a paper pretty rapidly after its publication. Integrating the area under the graph, we can estimate that half of all the first evaluations go live within about a month of the original publication date. It’s a bit slower for Medicine, and Medicine is slower overall, but I’m impressed.

(There are, as always, exceptions.)

And it’s important to remember that selection by F1000 predicts citation rates, beating the impact factor by two years or more.

That’s fast.

Here’s a closer look, just for gits and shiggles. This is combined Medicine and Biology counts, zooming in on that first month or two.

Look at that! We’re hot! And we’re fast!