Figure 1.

New journal articles associated with human or mouse TFs. Over the past five years, 216,421 journal articles associated with human or mouse genes have been published and indexed in NCBI PubMed. This amount represents 5.59% of all articles published and indexed during the same time frame (3,871,190 articles). Out of the 216,421 articles associated with human or mouse genes, at least 34,943 are associated with human or mouse TFs, or 16.15%. This is astounding when considering that known TFs represent only 5% of the genome. The proportion of journal articles associated with TFs has also been rising steadily over the past five years - from 15.47% in 2005 to 16.81% in 2009. These figures were determined with a conservative set of approximately 3,200 human and mouse TF genes derived from the works of Fulton et al. [4] and Vaquerizas et al. [5] and the publicly available 'gene2pubmed' annotation from NCBI.