It is nearly 20 years since the landmark paper (Saitou and Nei 1987) in Molecular Biology and Evolution introducing Neighbor-Joining (NJ). The method has become the most widely used method for building phylogenetic trees from distances, and the original paper has been cited about 13,000 times (Science Citation Index). Yet the question "what does the NJ method seek to do?" has until recently proved somewhat elusive, leading to some imprecise claims and misunderstanding. However, a rigorous answer to this question has recently been provided by further mathematical investigation, and the purpose of this note is to highlight these results and their significance for interpreting NJ. The origins of this story lie in a paper by Pauplin (2000) though its continuation has unfolded in more mathematically inclined literature. Our aim here is to make these findings more widely accessible.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 15. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 28 February 2025.
All research outputs
#2,756,025
of 28,695,121 outputs
Outputs from Molecular Biology and Evolution
#1,337
of 5,574 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#6,770
of 103,828 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Molecular Biology and Evolution
#5
of 38 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 28,695,121 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 90th percentile: it's in the top 10% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 5,574 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 17.3. This one has done well, scoring higher than 75% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 103,828 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 93% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 38 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done well, scoring higher than 86% of its contemporaries.
