Folding Forum

Hi
Correct me if I am wrong but points we resived per WU sig giving depend on the research value of that WU. And another way to measure research value is by how many scientific papers has been publist in high impact journals. So my questions is: Is there a ration between Points and papers?

No.

The two are different measurements. Some people prefer thinking in PPD, others focus on articles/year. Either way, maximizing either one is good.

In the early days of FAH, WUs were worth a very small amount of points, but papers still got published. So back then, the points/paper ratio was quite high.
Now, WUs are worth more, but although FAH has grown significantly and the rate of publications has increased, there is now a much higher ratio between points and papers.
I don't think you can correlate the two in general though. Every project is different, and some projects run on for longer than others. I don't think that there's a "X million points equals one paper" conversion, so the simple answer to your question is no as 7im pointed out.

On a related note, researchers that publish FAH papers are encouraged to acknowledge FAH donors for their computing power in their publications.

Jesse_V wrote:In the early days of FAH, WUs were worth a very small amount of points, but papers still got published. So back then, the points/paper ratio was quite high.
Now, WUs are worth more, but although FAH has grown significantly and the rate of publications has increased, there is now a much higher ratio between points and papers.....

Another way of looking at it is that as time goes on, the easier problems have been solved and FAH takes on harder ones. Much more processing is required to create new papers because the proteins are computationally harder. This is true despite significant improvements in how efficiently the computer resources are used when measured by some standardized criteria such as GFLOPS/WU or GFLOPS/paper. (Those improvements are often "under the radar" unless you look carefully at the information in the papers.) Couple those improvements with Moore's Law for hardware, and FAH's overall production is increasing very significantly, even in years when the number of papers/year doesn't change much.

More points means better papers, not necessarily more papers.