Top 100 Papers in Physics Ranked 152
Rob Carr writes "What do physicists care about most? Who are the greatest minds of our time? What physics papers have had the greatest impact? Sidney Redner attempts to answer that question by looking at the citations of all journals in the Physical Review Journals since 1893. He ranked the top 100 papers based on their 'impact': the number of citations times the average age of the citations. Einstein's Relativity papers, which were not in Physical Review journals, are the most stunning absence. 'Fan Favorites' are there - Einstein does make the list for the Einstein Podolsky Rosen paper. Feynman, Dirac, Bethe, Wheeler are on the list. Stephen Hawking does not make the list. Yet Nobel Prize winner Walter Kohn, who is virtually unknown to the general public, is an author on five of the 100 papers, including the top two and one of the top 15 'hot' papers. The paper goes into the statistics of the citations, a fascinating area in it's own right. Some papers make an immediate splash, while others might wait 50 years before their importance becomes apparent. The vast majority die a quick and quiet death. It's tempting to wonder if Redner's paper conclusively proves Sturgeon's Law."
Don't forget these papers. (Score:1, Funny)
Seriously, have you taken a look at the Berkeley Physics Department?
You can't go by Feynman's papers (Score:2, Funny)
Increase the impact of any physics paper (Score:1)
The trick many not increase the number of physicist who cite your paper, but it will make a big impression on the physicists you site.
LOL! (Score:1)
Re:Increase the impact of any physics paper (Score:1)
Herman Melville wrote a novel, White Jacket, in which a sailor was writing poems, and hiding them in a cannon. One day the gunner fired it, and his work was blown out over the ocean. Melville observed that this was probably the most effective way to publish.
It's just phys rev (Score:5, Insightful)
Non PDF Version (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Non PDF Version (Score:3, Informative)
The top title, with 3227 citations, is ``Self-Consistent Equations...'', from 1965, obviously a methods paper. The average age of the citations for it was 26 years. If you want to make a mark in your field, come up with some hot new method that everyone will use for decades.
Here are the top 100 titles from the paper, counting down from nu
Re:Non PDF Version (Score:1)
what makes u think that those robots cant find email address from pages that contain -"dot","at","yahoo",at specified interval....? (with ofcourse other emai lservice names also )
Re:Non PDF Version (Score:2)
Re:It's just phys rev (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's just phys rev (Score:1)
since france was the shit when it came to science around the time americans started to worry about big numbers ^_^ (look ma! i can
Re:It's just phys rev (Score:3, Interesting)
His web page is at http://www.physics.ucsb.edu/~kohn/ [ucsb.edu]
bl
Re:It's just phys rev (Score:2)
"Playboy magazine has twice published their own rankings of America's top party schools:
"The 2002 list read as follows:
22. University of California, Santa Barbara
Of course, UCSB is a SERIOUS place. (Kohn stays there because the coeds are so
Scientific collaboration networks (Score:5, Interesting)
Quick and quiet death? (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, and am I the only one that chortled at the fact that this paper, which lists the 100 most cited papers, had only 26 references?
Re:Quick and quiet death? (Score:2, Insightful)
heh, nope.
and how about these?
Read before you cite!
cond-mat/0212043
We report a method of estimating what percentage of people who cited a paper had actually read it. The method is based on a stochastic modeling of the citation process that explains empirical studies of misprint distributions in citations (which we show follows a Zipf law). Our estimate is only about 20% of ci
A weird coincidence. (Score:1)
Can't imagine anyone else will care except me, but this tickled me.
Five minutes ago I just referenced the same paper in response [slashdot.org] to a different slashdot article.
Nothing like discussing something you haven't thought of for a year only to stumble across it again minutes later.
Coincidence is fun.
Re:Quick and quiet death? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's amusing, but not surprising: the current paper doesn't need to cite those other papers. It doesn't refer to their research or conclusions. It just counts their citations. The sources for the citation counts, plus sources for the techniques used to analyze the data, should properly be cited.
Ring a bell? (Score:3, Funny)
Sturgeon's law (Score:5, Interesting)
Which says, "90% of everything is crap". A good test would be to look at the citations of the famous papers. Do they just cite other top 100 papers? Or did the authors of the best papers learn from the work of their less famous colleagues?
Re:Sturgeon's law (Score:1)
And since, lim n->infinity {(9/10)^n} is 0 then...
Re:Sturgeon's law (Score:5, Funny)
Mod Parent Up. (Score:1)
Re:Sturgeon's law (Score:1)
We're also forgetting about how things like "make tenure fast" (http://www.falstad.com/cite.html [falstad.com]) affect the rankings.
Re:Sturgeon's law (Score:2)
Re:Sturgeon's law (Score:2)
Interesting
Crapfully yours,
IT
Re:Sturgeon's law (Score:2)
You could actually reverse the logic: 10% of everything is not crap, or good stuff. So out of the remaining 90% there is also 10% good stuff. And 10% of the remaining, and so on... Using infinite loop you'll get that everything is good stuff.
Re:Sturgeon's law (Score:2)
No, repeating that indefinitely shows that there is an infinitesimal but non-zero amount of noncrap.
No, it doesn't. The next thing you'll say is that (1-0.99999...) is some infinitesimal but non-zero quantity.
Re:Sturgeon's law (Score:1)
Barring the crap in my bowels.
Re:Sturgeon's law (Score:1)
If 90% of everything is crap...
[using a simple infinite series|exercise left to reader]
However the infinitesimal will be rendered so small as to be unreadable. Which is to say it will be indistinguishable from the crap. Thus, by Occam's Razor, we shall say all of the papers are crap. Incidentally, this infinitesimal may or may not exist.
Counting Citations (Score:5, Interesting)
So, someone does some research where they count the number of citations and then do some statistical analysis of it. I do recall reading similar articles in Grad School. A professor of such-and-such would count the number of citations in his or her field of study and publish a paper on it. So, if my memory is still correct, it's been done before in fields other than Physics (I wish I could remember what fields).
Does this type of research really tell us anything? To me, all this tells us is that many other researchers spent alot of money either trying to prove or disprove Walter Kohn's theories. What this article doesn't tell us is whether or not Walter Kohn's theories are valid in the first place.
At least it's kind of interesting. Well, interesting if you enjoy the study of splitting atoms.
Re:Counting Citations (Score:5, Insightful)
Neither. Lot's of people have been using Walter Kohn's theory. The reason why he is at the top of the list is because of the sucess of density functional theory (DFT) first in condensed matter physics and then in chemistry. A goodly portion of the unclassified CPU power used my scientists around the world is probably dedicated to examining systems with DFT.
Essentially, there are two neat things about DFT. The first is that it proves that it is possible to fully describe the state of a bunch of electrons with the 4 dimensional spin density, rather than the normal 4N coordinates (where N is the number of electrons, 3 cartestians an a spin per electron). This, combined with Kohn-Sham theory results in a method of calculating electronic structure that formally scales and N^4, but gives answers often as accurate as N^5 and higher methods. Hence, Nobel Prize :)
Re:Counting Citations (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Counting Citations (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, sure, it is not going to win this guy a Nobel prize, but it is interesting. Maybe not "research" by many definitions of the word, but definitely interesting.
For example, while I am quite familiar with DFT and have read most (if not all) of the Kohn papers mentioned in the article, I would not have guessed he would have placed so high. But that is the neat thing. This paper shows how much physics and chemistry interact. Many of the other paper in this top 100 list are probably more cited in the chemistry literature than in physics (e.g. Carr-Parinello)
Serious methodology bias (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm a quantum chemist myself. I have to say I wasn't that surprized at all.
If you look at the list of Most cited chemists [univ-lemans.fr] John Pople is #2. Basically everyone who's contributed to Gaussian [gaussian.com] is up there.
(Note to non-chemists: Gaussian is the most used quantum chemistry software)
All these lists are strongly biased towards method-
Re:Counting Citations (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Counting Citations (Score:5, Insightful)
sPh
Re:Counting Citations (Score:3, Funny)
Actually, I just read a paper (Kuczera - Journal of Hydrology, 94 1987 p215 - 236) where the author DID cite Newton/Leibnitz when he differentiated an equation.
Re:Counting Citations (Score:1)
Funny you say that in connection with Kohn. Because the Hohenberg-Kohn proofs (In second-most cited paper on that list, from 1964), form the basic premise of DFT. (Basically, it proves the Schrödinger equation can be restated in terms of the electron density [fo
Re:Counting Citations (Score:1)
Well, yes. Not eveyone here needs all of that detail. There are a few other niggling "rules".
Anyway, I believe Levy has extended DFT (at least in the Kohn-Sham framework, but it should work without orbitals too...?) to excited states. PhysRevLett 1998 v83 p4361
Re:Counting Citations (Score:5, Interesting)
Sort of. What it tells us is how necessary it is for researchers to cite certain papers for the points they're studying to be understood.
What this research obliquely demonstrates is the obliteration phenomenon [everything2.com] - that certain works in physics (though we can only speculate which) are so well-known that it's unnecessary to cite them.
Eugene Garfield's paper on the subject, where he coined the term, is available here [upenn.edu] (because of the nature of the PDF, Google can't OCR it - sorry).
Re:Counting Citations (Score:2)
Re:Counting Citations (Score:2)
You have just answered what you can DO with citation indexing. What you can do with counting citations is not what I was asking. What I was asking is what kind of information can we gain by counting citations?
As far as I can tell, counting the citations is an interesting read. However, does it further the study of Physics in any way, shape or form? Does it provide deep insight into splitting atoms, or black holes, or any of those other subjects that excite
Re:Counting Citations (Score:2)
No, it does, however, advance the study of the study of physics.
Re:Counting Citations (Score:1)
It is a way of approximating the value of qualities that are not readily quantifiable.
The paper in question attemps to rank articles by how "influential" they were. But "influence" is hard to measure. We intuitively know it is a quality some papers have, but it can't be measured directly, like word count. So they chose a meta-measurement. If influence is the ability to affect others, then how many others were affected?
With Google, they are tr
Higgs? EW? (Score:4, Interesting)
pretty much every one of high energy particle physics papers published from Tevatron/FNAL and LEP/CERN data will cite those...
i guess their work wasn't in the papers scanned...
i'm kind of glad, as a PhD physicist and as a bit of a snob, that public popularity != scientific merit... you don't have to be known in public to have been a great physicist and also, just because you are know in public doesn't mean you were a great physicist.
for example, feynman no doubt did some great physics, but he gets much, MUCH greater recognition over two other guys who did the same work (tomonaga and schwinger, they shared the nobel prize) because he was a very accessible guy, a great speaker/teacher and had an amazingly outgoing personality. rarity for a physicist, indeed... :P
Re:Higgs? EW? (Score:2)
But you have a whole gaggle of condensed matter physics people doing DFT and another slew of chemists doing DFT, and even a few biologists are using DFT. So while Kohn's DFT papers may not have the most impact within physics, they have a lot of impact for science as a whole.
Re:Higgs? EW? (Score:5, Insightful)
for example, feynman no doubt did some great physics, but he gets much, MUCH greater recognition over two other guys who did the same work (tomonaga and schwinger, they shared the nobel prize)
You're correct that Feynman was a more dynamic speaker/teacher, etc. But I think it's a bit of a jump to say that that's the only reason why he gets more attention than Schwinger and Tomonaga. For starters, they didn't all do the same work, even on QED. It's true that all three arrived at equivalent formalisms for calculating amplitudes, but that's not the same as saying they did the same work. Have you thrown away Feynman diagrams and straightforward perturbation expansions and instead tried to do things the way Schwinger did? It's a bitch! As a famous quote of the time went, "Feynman shows you how to do it; Schwinger shows you that only he can do it." And that had a lot to do with the eventual predominance of Feynman's perspective, and thus his getting more recognition than Schwinger or Tomonaga.
Furthermore, while I can't speak to Tomonaga in this regard, Feynman made a major splash in a much broader spectrum of physical investigations than Schwinger did. The work on QED was simply one of many arguably Nobel-worthy accomplishments of his. That, too, contributes to his being paid more attention to than Schwinger and Tomonaga.
Of course, you could argue that these are only things that matter to the cognoscenti; they don't explain why Feynman is more recognized by the general public. But I would claim that contrary to what physicists, and geeks who like physics, think, the general public is pretty oblivious to physicists entirely. They've heard of Einstein; they might have heard of Hawking. That's pretty much it, though. We think of Feynman as famous; the average person on the street has never heard of him.
So while I would agree that Feynman's dynamic personality, excellence in presentation, etc., is important in the way he is remembered by those who are aware of him at all, at least equally important is the fact that he did a ton of amazing new physics.
Feynman (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Higgs? EW? (Score:2, Informative)
Feynman also gained a bit of public recognition because of his work on the commission investigating the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.
Re:Higgs? EW? (Score:1)
Another thing, the paper counts the number of citations IN Phys Rev papers, not the number of citations OF Phys Rev papers. A paper doesn't have to have been published in Phys Rev to be counted, only cited there. The idea is that the papers in Phys Rev form a random sample of all physics literature. I think a lot of people are missing that point.
most copied idea? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:most copied idea? (Score:3, Insightful)
Let me give an example. S
This is absolutely wonderful! (Score:2, Interesting)
I am a high school dropout.
Recently I developed a real passion for physics and have been reading introductory books like Hawking's Brief History and Feynman's Six Easy. This inspired me to self-teach myself calculus and algebra. I am just finishing up my high school via correspondence now and (don't want to brag) but I'm doing extremely well.
For me, interest in the sciences and math took a long time to come out but now it has. The only problem is I have very little to turn
Re:This is absolutely wonderful! (Score:5, Funny)
Ah, No.
Re:This is absolutely wonderful! (Score:2)
Hey, If you can read and understand these articles then more power to you. Personally, I have a better chance of winning the lottery than of ever being able to understand what these 100 articles are talking about.
FYI -- I do have a Master's degree in Public Administration. Of course, an MPA is not real degreee because it's not "real" science. It was just a way for me to avoid Law School.
Re:This is absolutely wonderful! (Score:5, Insightful)
From a theory of Hohenberg and Kohn, approximation methods for treating an inhomogeneous system of interacting electrons are developed. These methods are exact for systems of slowly varying or high density. For the ground state, they lead to self-consistent equations analogous to the Hartree and Hartree-Fock equations, respectively. In these equations the exchange and correlation portions of the chemical potential of a uniform electron gas appear as additional effective potentials. (The exchange portion of our effective potential differs from that due to Slater by a factor of 23.) Electronic systems at finite temperatures and in magnetic fields are also treated by similar methods. An appendix deals with a further correction for systems with short-wavelength density oscillations.
I kinda sorta knew what they were talking about up until Hartree and Hartree-Fock. After that I have no idea. For most of these papers, you really do need some graduate level education to know what's going on..
Re:This is absolutely wonderful! (Score:2)
Thanks for that post--and for the support. I was rated a "Troll" for just being realistic and telling the guy that most of these papers are way beyond the comprehension of about 99% of the population. You have now provided the AC with an example of just how tough reading these papers will be. If you could only send a note to the moderator that gave me a Troll rating.....
Re:This is absolutely wonderful! (Score:3, Informative)
Good luck studying, an
Re:This is absolutely wonderful! (Score:3, Informative)
these papers are usually only readable by people in that field. even other physicists don't understand papers outside of their field.
Re:This is absolutely wonderful! (Score:3, Informative)
I respectfully disagree with the recommendation of the Feynman lectures for someone just beginning to learn physics. While the Feynman lectures are well written and full of interesting insights, I find that they are only useful as a refresher or study guide for someone who has a working knowledge of basic physics and calculus (equivalent to the first two years of a four year program).
The main problems are lack of detailed examples and lack of revision sets. Without detailed examples, it is hard to do any
Re:This is absolutely wonderful! (Score:1)
sometimes it's easy to forget how little we used to know
Re:This is absolutely wonderful! (Score:2, Informative)
Textbooks... (Score:3, Insightful)
IMHO, if your goal is learning, you'd be much better off with some good textbooks. I know a textbook isn't as glamorous as reading the most cited papers in physics, but y
Kohn (Score:2, Informative)
* The Hulthen Kohn variational methods are a family of variational principles based on the stationary properties of the reactance or Kohn matrix K.
~
Kohn? Unknown? (Score:1, Interesting)
I had the chance to meet him (he was never my teacher, nor was i lucky enough to work in his research group) in an elevator once, we talked on the ride down. He is extremely nice and articulate.
Also DFT (Score:3, Interesting)
Because he (along with Sham) provided the Kohn-Sham equations, pretty much every paper that does anything to DFT (as oposed to things with DFT, but even then, many do) cite one or two of his papers.
The reason DFT kicks arse as a calculation
Re:Also DFT (Score:1)
Witten (Score:4, Informative)
In fact, based on a study of papers published between 1981 and 1997, he was the most-cited physicist in the world: in that period, he published 138 papers, with 23,235 citations: each paper he published was cited an average of 168 times. (The next closest to Witten was the semiconductor physicist Gossard, with 16,994 citations of 419 papers.) Most physicists would be overjoyed to publish one paper cited over 100 times.
Re:Witten (Score:2)
He won a Fields medal, which is like the mathematical equivalent of a Nobel Prize.
As an old math prof liked to point out, the reason there is no Nobel Prize in mathematics was that Alfred Nobel was irate at a mathematician for stealing his mistress.
CS Rankings (Score:5, Informative)
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/articles.html [psu.edu]
Dave
Re:CS Rankings (Score:2)
Einstein (Score:1)
Is this some form of popularity contest ?
Re:Einstein (Score:1)
Re:Einstein (Score:1)
zerg (Score:3)
bad data? (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems to me that this nullifies the comparison in some regards. If you rank by this number DEscending, you get a few old papers with a lot of citations... possibly just because they're old. If you rank by this number Ascending, you get just the newest papers without significant numbers of citations. It might be better to rank by either total numbers of citations or "the number of citations *divided* by the average citation age", and use a DEscending rank. This way, recent works get a 'fair' (or 'fairer') comparison against older works.
Re:bad data? (Score:2)
Collect Them All! (Score:2, Funny)
And I just got another Sir I. Newton card. Drat!
Bah... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Bah... (Score:2, Insightful)
I perhaps agree, but I have the impression that "publishing good papers" is the key to a scientist having a good career.
Aren't papers the main output of scientists, similar to the tagline "A Mathematician is a device which converts coffee into theorems"?
I really want to believe that "there is more to being a scientist than publishing a good paper" but I'm having a hard time thinking of what that "more" is. Rightly o
Re:Bah... (Score:1)
Feynman Rev.Mod.Phys.20:367-387,1948 missing? (Score:2)
paper was one of the heavier cited. I checked on database,
Spires, showing 464 cites. He has others with many more,
but they are more recent (60s/70s) so they would be weighted
less.
I guess any attempt to quantify citations is difficult unless
all journals in all languages are somehow put online. Even so there were some interesting papers listed.
Re:Feynman Rev.Mod.Phys.20:367-387,1948 missing? (Score:3, Informative)
Kohn, unknown to the general public (Score:2, Interesting)
Obviously a bad measure (Score:3, Insightful)
This type of analysis, while useful for bureaucrats who need simple, if inaccurate metrics, is still dubious. The most cited papers often turn out to be methods papers e.g. how to run gels rather than those with the most import.
Harvard tenure requirements (Score:1)
Sturgeon's Law (Score:1)
How to tell you're a citation-starved physicist (Score:2)
stephen hawking (Score:1, Flamebait)
What I thought was striking (Score:2, Interesting)
Metaphysics? (Score:1, Funny)
Who cares, I wonder?
Historia Naturalis Principia Matematica (Score:1, Interesting)
--Joonas Kekoni
Next TV Countdown? (Score:1)
Re:This is not so new (Score:4, Informative)
The similarity is what caught my eye. "Impact Factors" have had an interesting effect on medicine: fighting has increased for the "right" journal to publish an article in seems to have increased, tenure, salary, and position can be affected by ranking, and I suspect it's had undue influence on what is researched. As Niven would say, "Think of it as evolution in action." Evolution, unfortunately, has a nasty habit of getting caught in local minima or trapped by past choices.
If this type of ranking catches on, physics will experience similar effects - both good and bad.
BTW: I had a copy of a VH1 joke in the draft of this article, but I cut it out. I'm glad - it works far better as a department. Short and funny always beats a long setup.
Re:Noone understands! (Score:4, Interesting)
Einstein's GR, however, was much less widely read, even though its importance was widely recognized. If somebody published a paper in quantum mechanics in the 1930s, a lot of people read it because their work was contingent on it. GR, however, just sort of popped out of nowhere, and since it hadn't existed before, Einstein's future audience was still in graduate school.
Re:Noone understands! (Score:1, Interesting)
-Richard Feynman (1967)
Re:Stephen Hawking not on the list. Not surprising (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Stephen Hawking not on the list. Not surprising (Score:2, Funny)
And sitting in Newton's chair no less. Go figure.
Newton had an electric wheelchair with a speech synthesiser? Man, that guy was way ahead of his time.