Despite these strengths, the selection of candidate loci and genes based on number of publications retrieved by the HuGE Navigator Phenopedia has some limitations. One limitation is that no data suggests that the potential significance of a given gene is directly proportional to the number of publications. Despite this, we felt that the number of publications is an indicator of research efforts devoted to a given gene. By selecting genes with the most publications, we sought to capture well-studied genes that had been the focus of the field in the past. A second potential limitation is that we did not exclude publications based on the same datasets. Because we used a low threshold of greater than 5 publications in the initial analysis, however, we are confident that we did not exclude any genes that have been examined in many studies. Additionally, the most well-studied loci of the ten genes with the most publications were selected based on expert opinion and were felt to be unambiguously widely studied even if the exact order may not be reflective of the number of data sets published on the genes.
