Galaxy Project Stats

This page contains statistics about the Galaxy Project. This page is updated every January and July, or whenever the project has a grant due, or whenever an advisory board meeting is set to occur.

Galaxy Support: Help Forum & Gitter Chat

The Galaxy Help Forum, help.galaxyproject.org, replaced the Galaxy BioStar site on November 29, 2018. It was created as a brand new site, with none of the posts or user data from our old BioStar site copied over.

Average monthly page views have doubled in the most recent 12 months. During this same time period, the number of new questions and new answers averaged about 75 and 150, respectively, throughout the year. The fact that page views doubled, but questions and answers held steady over 2020 may indicate that the site hit a critical mass of responses: When people visit, they are now much more likely to find that someone has already asked and answered their question.


The number of accounts in Galaxy Help during any month. It reflects newly created and deleted accounts. Note that you don't have to create an account to search the site. You only need an account to engage in some way, such as asking a question, posting an answer, or voting on a thread. The number of active accounts (accounts that login) each month floats between 150 and 200.


Membership in the two main support channels over time: help.galaxyproject.org and the project's main Gitter/Matrix room.

The Galaxy community uses Gitter.im / Matrix for chat, and there are many different channels, depending upon the topic. Here are the channels with 35 or more members.

Mailing Lists

Most of Galaxy's mailing list traffic has migrated to the help forum and to Gitter. The Galaxy-Announce (see below) and Galaxy-Dev mailing lists remain the only frequently active mailing lists. Here's the history:

  • 2011/12: Galaxy-Announce list launched.
  • 2012/02: Default mailing list for newly registered users on usegalaxy.org was switched from Galaxy-User to Galaxy-Announce in mid 2012/02. At the same time a link to the other lists was also added to the registration form.
  • 2014/04: Most of Galaxy-User traffic moved to the Galaxy BioStar online forum.
  • 2014/06: Galaxy-User mailing list disabled. All new user support traffic now goes to Galaxy BioStar
  • 2018/11: Galaxy Help Forum launched, superseding Galaxy BioStar site

Communication Channels

The project uses the Galaxy-Announce mailing list and Twitter to keep the community up to date on what's happening in the larger Galaxy community. Galaxy-Announce was launched in December 2011 and became the default mailing list for newly registered users on usegalaxy.org in February 2012. The Galaxy project started using Twitter on a regular basis in February 2011.

Here's membership in both channels since they were launched.

Communities

Several domain-specific and regional/language-based Galaxy Communities also exist. Here are their numbers as of January 2020.

Geography/Language-based Community / Channel Membership / Followers
Galaxy-Australia Twitter 807
Galaxy-UK Twitter 451
UseGalaxy.EU Gitter 388
Galaxy Arabic Twitter 93
Galaxy Africa Mailing List 56
Topic-Based Community / Channel
Galaxy Training Gitter 412
Galaxy Admins Gitter 185
Galaxy IUC Gitter 165
Galaxy Training Mailing List 160
Galaxy Proteomics Mailing List 93
Galaxy Dev Gitter 77

Publications / Citations

The Galaxy Publications Library lists every publication we know of that is about, references, or mentions Galaxy. We started tracking publications partway through 2011, so this may be an undercount for that year and previous years.

Here are the tags on papers in the Galaxy Publications Library as of August 2021:

Year # Pubs Methods UsePublic Workbench UseMain RefPublic UseLocal Tools IsGalaxy Reproducibility Cloud Other Shared Unknown HowTo Project Education Visualization UseCloud
2005 1 1
2006 4 3 1
2007 12 2 7 1 2 2
2008 32 15 12 1 2 2 1 1
2009 53 27 18 3 2 1 1 4 1 1
2010 107 50 36 1 1 5 1 1 7 4 5
2011 205 93 69 1 8 16 6 3 8 3 4 6 1 1
2012 398 197 1 128 3 3 30 15 7 14 9 12 10 12 10 1 2
2013 506 264 16 149 92 12 29 37 29 9 22 9 22 13 7 6 3 3 2
2014 741 331 60 226 98 30 43 67 48 25 40 39 23 7 12 7 2 8 1
2015 930 474 140 233 116 52 58 68 49 26 48 33 23 14 8 11 1 7 3
2016 1125 575 213 246 115 116 73 73 49 46 37 47 19 13 20 7 2 9 4
2017 1334 760 279 239 138 110 98 76 72 72 35 26 24 23 8 6 5 7 1
2018 1576 1027 375 235 185 137 109 51 46 76 27 18 26 25 16 8 6 6 3
2019 1933 1315 585 237 205 168 140 63 51 85 22 17 25 5 12 6 12 4 2
2020 2164 1549 704 217 265 153 134 79 60 64 11 17 21 4 10 11 27 10 3
2021 575 412 222 63 57 43 24 22 19 7 4 2 14 2 5 8 8
2022 1 1
Total 11697 7091 2595 2118 1277 822 711 578 463 423 264 219 219 132 122 96 68 58 19

The Tags graph highlights several trends.

  • Methods: The number of methods papers continues to grow every year.
  • UsePublic: UsePublic papers (papers that use a publicly accessible Galaxy server other than UseGalaxy.org) is the fastest growing category, and there have been more UsePublic papers than UseMain (main = UseGalaxy.org) since 2015.

Galaxy Platforms

Galaxy is available in a number of ways. While most installations of Galaxy are private, many groups support Galaxy instances in many different forms, including publicly accessible servers, Galaxy instance that can be easily launched on research and commercial clouds, containers, and virtual machines. Prior to 2019 we counted only publicly accessible servers. Moving forward we are tracking many ways to use galaxy.

Platforms in Publications

In late 2017 the project started tracking which specific platforms (besides usegalaxy.org) that were used or referenced in publications. Here are the platforms that have been mentioned in more than 30 publications since we started tracking this, as of August 2021.

Year Huttenhower RepeatExplorer Workflow4Metabolomics UseGalaxy.eu ARGs-OAP CPT Galaxy-P Cistrome UseGalaxy.org.au Pasteur deepTools Globus Genomics RiboGalaxy PhenoMeNal
Pre-2017 1 12 2 2 8 4 2 10 1
2017 45 24 16 5 12 6 5 1 1 3 1
2018 162 57 39 10 18 6 18 17 3 3 14 11 17 7
2019 227 66 57 37 43 65 20 21 17 15 16 8 13 12
2020 357 70 54 79 45 15 26 18 23 14 6 7 4 7
2021 116 13 20 34 11 16 7 3 10 8 1 1 3
Total 908 242 188 160 124 102 91 69 53 45 40 38 38 30

Code: Commits and Committers

We are planning a thorough update of this section in 2020.

According to Open Hub:

This is one of the largest open-source teams in the world, and is in the top 2% of all project teams on Open Hub.

Tools

Galaxy Project Tool Shed

The Galaxy Project Tool Shed contains contributed software and workflows that can be installed at any Galaxy site.

Toolshed Download Statistics

Downloads aggregated by user are available, but these are simply extracted from the Toolshed API. These are life-time statistics, monthly downloads are not available.

Events

As the Galaxy events calendar and archive show, the Galaxy community is globally active, with around 100 events per year for the past several years. Galaxy Community Conferences are the flagship event of the Galaxy community. GCC has met annually since 2010 and has had over 200 participants every year since 2012.

Want the underlying numbers?

All of the underlying numbers are available as TSV files. Contact Galaxy Outreach if you would like copies.