I feel that PLOS is a reputable journal, and this article needs more scoping!
Rise and Demise of Bioinformatics? Promise and Progress: http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002487
I posted it on linkedin, so adding it here for stoking a discussion. On the contrary to the age-group analogy of bioinformatics being at its adulthood or beyond, I feel bioinformatics is currently in its prime. If there were just 30% researchers thinking about bioinformatics 5 years ago, now its more than 75%, at least in my experience. Bioinformatics is the fastest growing group in so many discussions I have had with various institutes, especially due to the next-gen sequencing influx.
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If there is any demise to be afraid of it may be for the quality of the peer review process - this very paper may be an example of that.
It seems little more than wild extrapolations and subjective opinions based on inconsequential observations.
I agree that it reads as an editorial and it probably should be labelled as one, especially as the author is an editor of the journal itself:
"... is an Associate Editor for PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS ONE, and BioSystems, has been an Associate Editor for Bioinformatics, and an editorial board member of a number of journals and the Faculty of 1000. He is a founding officer of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), the Mikrobiokosmos initiative (Greece), and the Hellenic Society for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (HSCBB)"
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What's the question? Might be better suited to the Forum section (see menu links at top).
I agree, it is argumentative and would be better as forum post. I have skimmed the "Review", I agree with the concerns raised at first glance, it seems to be a singular opinion on trends backed only by google trends (I remember we had another very funny question about this 'decline' topic). It might have been published to start a discussion, but I have the impression that the paper is not scientific. If you google the Author, you might get more insight into his background, though I really don't understand why one can base a "Review" on such poor grounds. To me it looks like an editorial text, stating an opinion, and indeed it is part of an editorial series.
We could develop a different picture here, and point out where we agree or disagree.
someone already moved it to the forum section. thanks!
The link is not working for me, if someone else has the same problem: http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002487
I checked the link in the post and tried to correct it, it is correct, but it is not displayed correctly in the generated html, might be a bug.
this comes from an third party library, it cannot cope with the colon : that is embedded into the link. The link needs to be listed explicitly. I have a fix but needs to be tested more, will be applied next week.