10 Years of Toxicogenomics section in Frontiers in Genetics: Past discoveries and Future Perspectives

Abstract

The Frontiers Media family has over 200 journals, which are each headed by usually one Field Chief Editor, and several thousand specialty sections, which are each headed by one or more Specialty Chief Editors. The year 2021 was the 10th anniversary of the founding of the Frontiers in Genetics journal and the Frontiers in Toxicogenomics specialty section of this journal. In 2021, we also announce one of the newest of the Frontiers journals-Frontiers in Toxicology which is part of the Frontiers Media family of journals but independent of Frontiers in Genetics. Dr. Ruden is the founding, and currently sole, Specialty Chief Editor of Frontiers in Toxicogenomics and one of 9 Specialty Chief Editors of Frontiers in Toxicology. As of 2021, Frontiers in Toxicogenomics has published over 138 articles and has over 370 Editors including 90 Associate Editors and 280 Review Editors. The Frontiers in Genetics impact factor was initially approximately 2.5 when it was first listed in PubMed in 2015 and has risen steadily to its current value of 4.8, which is typical for the majority of the over 200 Frontiers journals that have established impact factors. In this overview of the first decade of Frontiers in Toxicogenomics, we discuss the top 5 articles with the highest Scopus citations, which were all written in the first few years of the journal. The article with the highest number of citations, with 353 Scopus over 600 Google Scholar citations, and the highest average number of citations (67) that steadily increased from 10 citations in 2013 to 119 citations in 2021, was written in 2012 by Dr. Ruden's laboratory and titled, "Using Drosophila melanogaster as a model for genotoxic chemical mutational studies with a new program, SnpSift." The five most influential authors who published in the journal in the past 10 years based on Scopus citations of a particular paper are Dr. Ruden's laboratory, with 353 Scopus citations for the SnpSift paper mentioned above; Drs. Brock Christensen and Carmen J. Marsit, with 86 Scopus citations for their review, "Epigenomics in environmental health"; Dr. Michael Aschner and colleagues, with 61 Scopus citations for their paper "Genetic factors and manganese-induced neurotoxicity"; and Dr. Sandra C. dos Santos and colleagues, with 59 Scopus citations for their paper, "Yeast toxicogenomics: genome-wide responses to chemical stresses with impact in environmental health, pharmacology, and biotechnology." While the top 5 papers were published in the early years of the journal, we will also discuss a more recent article published in 2018 on a comparison of RNA-seq and microarray methods by Dr. Michael Liguori's laboratory, "Comparison of RNA-Seq and Microarray Gene Expression Platforms for the Toxicogenomic Evaluation of Liver From Short-Term Rat Toxicity Studies," that far exceeds the number of downloads and views of all the other articles published in the first 10 years of the journal and will likely be a top cited paper in the second decade highlights of this journal. Finally, we discuss where the Frontiers in Toxicogenomics specialty journal and the Frontiers in Toxicology journal will go to advance the field of toxicogenomics, and more generally, toxicology, in the future.

Keywords: environmental health; epigenomics; genomics; toxicogenomics; toxicology; transcriptomics.

FIGURE 1

Cumulative number of publications and research topic publications. (A) Word cloud of titles from the first 25 of the 138 publications published in the first 10 years of Frontiers in Toxicogenomics/section. The size of the word is proportional to the frequency that word is used in the titles (figure made from http://wordart.com). (B). Cumulative number of publications (all–blue; research topic–orange). Note that research topics currently include over half of the submitted publications.

FIGURE 2

Scopus citations and views for top 5 cited publications in Frontiers in Toxicogenomics. (A) Number of Scopus citations for all publications in Frontiers in Toxicogenomics. The number of publications with 0–9, 10–19, et cetera Scopus citations are shown. The average number of Scopus citations is 11.81. One publication written by the author’s laboratory. (B) had 352 Scopus citations, which is an outlier compared with all of the other publications (Cingolani et al., 2012a). (B) Loop views of the publication with the largest number of Scopus citations. The publication “Using Drosophila melanogaster as a model for genotoxic chemical mutational studies with a new program, SnpSift” by the author’s laboratory had 353 Scopus citations and 8,951 views at the time of writing this review (Cingolani et al., 2012a). (C) Loop views of the publication with the second largest number of Scopus citations. The publication “Epigenomics in environmental health” by Drs. Christensen and Marsit had 86 Scopus citations and 8,464 views (Christensen and Marsit, 2011). (D) Loop views of the publication with the third largest number of Scopus citations. The publication “Genetic factors and mangenese induced neurotoxicity” by Dr. Michael Aschner’s laboratory, who was a co-Specialty Chief Editor for Frontiers in Toxicogenomics for 5 years, had 61 Scopus citations and 6,175 views (Chen et al., 2014). (E) Loop views of the publication with the fourth largest number of Scopus citations. The publication “Yeast toxicogenomics: genome-wide responses to chemical stresses with impact in environmental health, pharmacology, and biotechnology” by Dr. Sa-Correia’s laboratory had 59 Scopus citations and 11,994 views (Dos Santos et al., 2012). (F) The publication “Applications for next-generation sequencing in fish ecotoxicogenomics” by Dr. Denslow’s laboratory had 50 Scopus citations and 11, 296 views (Mehinto et al., 2012).