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PLoS at the White House

I have no time to blog, but I couldn’t keep this small factoid to my self: PLoS ONE is already influencing the US government.

I was rummaging around in the page stats for the PLoS ONE site earlier today (4 million hits from 31 thousand unique visitors in February, thank you for asking) and was glancing down the list of external links through which users have entered PLoS ONE.

Most of these are fairly obvious:
almost 5 thousand arrivals from PubMed for example (all numbers in this post refer to the month of February by the way).

Some were interesting:
1 thousand 7 hundred users arrived by way of the Spanish language evolution blog “El Blog de Evolutionibus”, the highest referral from any blog.

Some were surprising:
3 thousand 5 hundred from 154 pages on Alf Eaton’s re-presentation site, PLoS Too.

But the one that particularly caught my eye was 15 arrivals from a page http://www.whitehouse.gov/_f0f0fdaabd87ae345e0056t287e1589a.jsp. OK 15 referals isn’t many but still, I was intrigued. Unfortunately the referring page doesn’t exist anymore and I’m not experienced at using things like the Wayback Machine. However a quick search on the White House website turned up a report from the Domestic Policy Council dated 9th January 2007 “Advancing Stem Cell Science Without Destroying Human Life” and also a reference list from The President’s Council on Bioethics “New Advances in Non-Embryonic Stem Cell Research Since 2005”. Both of these cite two PLoS ONE papers “Designer Self-Assembling Peptide Nanofiber Scaffolds for Adult Mouse Neural Stem Cell 3-Dimensional Cultures Fabrizio” by Gelain et al. and “Mesenchymal Stem Cell-Mediated Functional Tooth Regeneration in Swine” by Wataru Sonoyama et al.

I call that pretty good penetrance for a journal that was less than a month old!

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