Finally, I (PBP) discovered the right book for me. After starting a few other ones, putting them down, forcing myself to read on, taking another break, I abandoned the book pile with a bad conscious. After weeks of search, this is my page‐turner, keeping me up at night. It seems the book is rather special, being the story of a journalist's parents who meet in Norway during the Nazi occupation.1 What makes it particular is that a Norwegian teenager falls forever in love with a German soldier. The world around them disintegrates; both face indescribable hardships because of their feelings for one another. My taste must be special, hard‐to‐please or simply sophisticated! Nonsense. My book preference is like that of most others, and the worst is, my liking is largely foreseeable and can be fit into a standard equation.

These are the true reasons I cannot put this book down: Biographies, as my book of reading, top the New York Times bestseller ranking of non‐fictional books, selling per title more than 800 copies a week. The runner‐up genre is history, again as my book, with more than weekly 500 copies sold.2 Reflecting these somber numbers in selling and my liking for this particular book, one‐third of the US citizens name history as their favourite genre, while almost as many prefer biographies and memoirs. 2 What ultimately unmasks me as being a Joe Average and collapses my collection of life‐lies of being special is this: authors who had worked in journalism have the greatest chance of writing a debut bestseller according to a computer‐driven bestseller algorithm.3 Of course, the author of my present book is a journalist, in fact a woman journalist. The latter is interesting, because women are most successful when it comes to writing romance the computer tells us. Just like my book.

Sweeping aside the shards of my shattered dream of being unique, why not make something useful out of this devastating insight? Something like breaking the code for highly successful manuscripts in Acta Physiologica. Gender issues on publishing?4-6 Never again, I promise.

As, hopefully, the genre of all articles published in Acta Physiologica are non‐fictional, this category is not a promising variable in the prospective equation. We do have different subject categories, though, and here we see that manuscripts in muscle physiology, exercise and metabolism outperform. As a measure of performance, we take the amount of citations received and the Field Weighted Citation Index Trend. This latter indicator compares citations to a field in a journal, with citations to this field in the same year, but in the other journals. Remarkably, the short list of articles that have made it on this year's US$ 100 000 Acta Physiologica Award contains many manuscripts in the aforementioned outperforming fields.

Are there any other potential factors in making articles successful? Indeed, the number of authors correlates well with the amount of citations a manuscript receives. When comparing original articles submitted to Acta Physiologica from 2013 to 2015, this correlation was weak (R = 0.137), but highly significant (P < .001, Figure 1). Refrences to the articles were counted from the date of appearance until Dec. 31 of the following year.

A possible reason for this surprising correlation may be that comprehensive manuscripts require more researchers, perhaps from many different institutions. Since the number of author institutions does not significantly correlate with citations to a manuscript (P > .1), this may not be the case. Perhaps the explanation is simpler. The more authors contributing to a manuscript, the higher the number of self‐citations to the manuscript, as more investigators are likely to write more manuscripts than, eg a single author.

What may surprise is that the amount of figures in a manuscript correlates with citations as well. Creating figures can be tedious and time consuming. A task that is tackled more enthusiastically when the data are worth displaying. Perhaps that is the reason for the weak (R = 0.138), yet again significant correlation (P < .001).

As mentioned in previous editorials,7-11 Acta Physiologica has the privilege of receiving and publishing many manuscripts that leave a mark. The size of the authors list is a weak determinant as are the figure numbers. Geographical diversity seems to have a greater importance. The median citation to an original article published between 2015 and 2017 is greatest for authors active in The United Kingdom, followed by Germany and Denmark. When looking at the better comparable Field Weighted Citation Index Trend, of all published items from 2015 to date, China and The United Kingdom are star submitting countries. Their publications outclass the average manuscripts of their respective fields 10:1.