Farewell then, PubMed Commons

PubMed Commons, the NCBI’s experiment in comments for PubMed articles, has been discontinued. Thoroughly too, with all traces of it expunged from the NCBI website.

Last time I wrote about the service, I concluded “all it needs now is more active users, more comments per user and a real API.” None of those things happened. Result: “NIH has decided that the low level of participation does not warrant continued investment in the project, particularly given the availability of other commenting venues.”

NLM also write that “all comments are archived on our FTP site.” A CSV file is available at this location. So is it good for anything?

An Analysis of Contributions to PubMed Commons

I recently saw a tweet floating by which included a link to some recent statistics from PubMed Commons, the NCBI service for commenting on scientific articles in PubMed. Perhaps it was this post at their blog. So I thought now would be a good time to write some code to analyse PubMed Commons data.

The tl;dr version: here’s the Github repository and the report.

For further details and some charts, read on.