Can an alternate allele be more common than a reference allele?
Yes, depending on how the reference allele was determined. If, for example, you want to refer to hg38 as the reference genome, then it's important to use the hg38 allele as reference.

Without stating the reference allele convention? Not that I'm aware of. However many people refer to minor/major alleles rather than non-reference alleles, in which case it is assumed that the major allele is the most common allele.


As long as you state what your reference genome and/or population is, then it's fine to choose your own convention about reference alleles. But please be consistent and explicit about what you've done. One of my biggest struggles in GWAS has been working out the correct strand orientation for stated variants (important when merging datasets), and it doesn't help for complementary variants (i.e. A/T, C/G) when the ref/alt alleles are arbitrarily chosen.