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Science

Top 100 Papers in Physics Ranked 152

Posted by simoniker from the like-vh1-but-better dept.
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."
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Top 100 Papers in Physics Ranked More

Top 100 Papers in Physics Ranked

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  • Without these [zigzag.com], many discoveries in physics wouldn't have been possible.

    Seriously, have you taken a look at the Berkeley Physics Department?

  • You can't go by Feynman's papers (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Surely he was joking. [amazon.com]
    • I doubt that many slashdotters will make the list of physic papers with the most impact. However, you can increase the impact of any physics paper by folding it into the shape of a plane, then sticking a needle out of tip of the plane.

      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.

  • It's just phys rev (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dbitch ( 553938 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @12:47PM (#9863700)
    Yeah, but it's just Phys Rev. A lot of cool stuff happens that never gets published in Phys Rev. Sometimes, it's a talk at a symposium that is published and makes a big splash.

    • Non PDF Version (Score:3, Informative)

      by FelixCat ( 594769 )
      Anyone find a non-pdf version. Here is the list of top 100 papers in text form, converted using pdftotext [ucsd.edu]. Skip down a bit for the actual list of the top 100 papers.

      • Re:Non PDF Version (Score:3, Informative)

        by RealAlaskan ( 576404 )
        Here it is, in several other formats. [arxiv.org] You can have postscript in two font choices, pdf, DVI, or the LaTeX source (which is ASCII with relatively unobtrusive markup).

        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

        • If I put my email address here, address harvesting ``robots'' will collect it for spammers (no, I'm not making that up). So, you'll have to assemble it from these instructions. Contact me at: nels dot yahoo at member.fsf.org On ur site.

          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 )

      • You forgot to convert the plots to ASCII art. In addition your method may prove less tan useful with papers containing mathematical equations.

    • Re:It's just phys rev (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rsidd ( 6328 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @02:09PM (#9864083)
      Not only that, but before World War II, the "centre of gravity" for science was really Europe, not America, so hardly any of the major papers in quantum mechanics and so on got published in the Physical Review journals. So this survey is highly biased to the years after 1945. That's why condensed matter physics does so well: its golden age was the 1950s and the 1960s, when basic quantum mechanics was well understood and techniques from quantum field theory were being applied to solid state systems for the first time.
      • that kind of reminds me of an article i read...quite interesting...explaining why traditional british english as i understand it used billion to mean a million million (10^12) versus american english which has always (to the best of my knowledge) used million as 10^9. apparently through some history i can't quite remember from the article, france began to use million as 10^9.

        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)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Since no one has mentioned it: the Kohn in question won the Nobel Prize in 1998 and is still active and teaching at UC Santa Barbara (confirming his good taste as well as Physics acumen).

        His web page is at http://www.physics.ucsb.edu/~kohn/ [ucsb.edu]

        bl
        • From here [snopes.com],
          "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 ... serious.) :-)

  • Scientific collaboration networks (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mattjb0010 ( 724744 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @12:48PM (#9863704) Homepage
    If you're interested in network theory in general, and as it applies to scientific collaborations, you could do much worse than checking out Mark Newman's publications [santafe.edu], in particular this [santafe.edu], this [santafe.edu], and this [arxiv.org].

  • Quick and quiet death? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rde ( 17364 ) * on Monday August 02, 2004 @12:49PM (#9863711)
    As has been pointed out, it's possible for a paper to lie undiscovered for decades before being revived; Mandel [angelfire.com] being the most obvious example. I'd suggest that papers didn't die; they're in hibernation.

    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?
    • 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?

      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

      • 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.

    • 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?

      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)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 02, 2004 @12:50PM (#9863718)
    Some papers make an immediate splash, while others might wait 50 years before their importance becomes apparent
    Sounds like the USPTO...

  • Sturgeon's law (Score:5, Interesting)

    by philbert26 ( 705644 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @12:50PM (#9863720)
    It's tempting to wonder if Redner's paper conclusively proves Sturgeon's Law."

    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?

    • Which says, "90% of everything is crap"

      And since, lim n->infinity {(9/10)^n} is 0 then...

    • Re:Sturgeon's law (Score:5, Funny)

      by Chess_the_cat ( 653159 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @02:17PM (#9864135) Homepage
      But if 90% of everything is crap then aren't 90 of these top 100 papers crap as well?
      • parent is far more insightful than grandparent.

      • We're also forgetting about how things like "make tenure fast" (http://www.falstad.com/cite.html [falstad.com]) affect the rankings.

      • Yes. They are the top-crap. And then, 9 of the 10 top papers are top-10 crap. And then, 90% of the top paper is crap. There's very little in this world that's worth very much. But we have a lot of nice crap!
      • But if 90% of everything is crap then aren't 90 of these top 100 papers crap as well?

        Interesting ... so if 90% of everything is crap, then of the remaining 10%, 90% of THAT is crap, too. So 99% of everything is crap. But then 90% of the remaining 1% is crap, so 99.9% is crap. Repeating this indefinitely, it follows that 100% of everything is crap.

        Crapfully yours,
        IT
        • Interesting ... so if 90% of everything is crap, then of the remaining 10%, 90% of THAT is crap, too. So 99% of everything is crap. But then 90% of the remaining 1% is crap, so 99.9% is crap. Repeating this indefinitely, it follows that 100% of everything is crap.

          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.
      • Perhaps this could be Chess' corollary

        If 90% of everything is crap...

        [using a simple infinite series|exercise left to reader] ...then only an infinitesimal of non-crap can ever exist.

        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)

    by lucabrasi999 ( 585141 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @12:56PM (#9863758) Journal

    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)

      by rangek ( 16645 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @01:12PM (#9863812)

      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.

      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)

        by lucabrasi999 ( 585141 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @01:17PM (#9863843) Journal
        Note: I wasn't questioning Walter Kohn. I was questioning the theory behind the original article. How does counting citations become classified as "research".

        • Re:Counting Citations (Score:5, Insightful)

          by rangek ( 16645 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @01:41PM (#9863951)

          How does counting citations become classified as "research".

          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)

          • 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.

            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-
        • You can call the systematic study of just about anything, digging through different sources, "research." It's just that this is research on physics papers and their authors, not on physics itself.

      • Re:Counting Citations (Score:5, Insightful)

        by sphealey ( 2855 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @02:12PM (#9864106)
        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.
        The problem here is that if a concept is a "safety pin" - which is to say, after it has been described for the first time it is blindingly obvious to everyone in the field - then it may never be cited regardless of how seminal it actually was. No one cites Newton/Leibnitz every time they differentiate an equation in a physics paper, to take an extreme example.

        sPh

        • No one cites Newton/Leibnitz every time they differentiate an equation in a physics paper, to take an extreme example.

          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.
        • The problem here is that if a concept is a "safety pin" - which is to say, after it has been described for the first time it is blindingly obvious to everyone in the field - then it may never be cited regardless of how seminal it actually was.

          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:5, Interesting)

      by AEton ( 654737 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @02:07PM (#9864071)
      Does this type of research really tell us anything?

      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).
      • Google can't OCR it because google doesn't OCR. It just breaks down the PDF (dunno if they wrote that part, or borrowed it) and stores the text. If google did OCR, it would be a lot more powerful, not that it isn't quite powerful already. Extra points if they render flash to a bitmap and OCR that...

  • Higgs? EW? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 02, 2004 @12:57PM (#9863759)
    I'm surprised to not see more papers on electroweak/higgs theory. higgs, salam and weinberg aren't there, from the quick glance. glashow and maiani comes up at #73.


    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

    • pretty much every one of high energy particle physics papers published from Tevatron/FNAL and LEP/CERN data will cite those...

      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)

      by Bootsy Collins ( 549938 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @01:19PM (#9863846)

      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)

        by daniel_mcl ( 77919 )
        He's famous at least in Pasadena (where he taught at Caltech for several years); there are photographs of him all over the place and even a Feynman collage on the wall of a clothing store.

      • Re:Higgs? EW? (Score:2, Informative)

        by forii ( 49445 )
        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.


        Feynman also gained a bit of public recognition because of his work on the commission investigating the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.

    • Weinberg's seminal paper is there. "A model of leptons" is number 18. I don't think Abdus Salam is actually cited very frequently.

      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)

    by 192939495969798999 ( 58312 ) <info AT devinmoore DOT com> on Monday August 02, 2004 @12:58PM (#9863763) Homepage Journal
    I think it might say more about the most copied idea... a lot of times citations are made to basically restate someone else's idea, not that it particularly has to do with the researcher's idea, but as a refresher. To get that kinda info, you'd need to build a tree of some kind, right?

    • Re:most copied idea? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ggwood ( 70369 )
      Just referenced, not copied. Many references in a paper are to papers you are comparing with: e.g. disagreeing with. Further, some you just use as background. I suppose you could say extended upon - but usually if you are "extending" a theory it is because there is some problem with the existing theory. Further, once a theory (or, say, an experimental technique) becomes standard, it is no longer referenced and that space is given over to either a review article or a text book.

      Let me give an example. S

  • This is absolutely wonderful! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is absolutely wonderful.

    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)

      by lucabrasi999 ( 585141 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @01:39PM (#9863939) Journal
      Mind you many of these will be for graduate-level people but I'm sure many can be read by the layman

      Ah, No.

    • The papers listed are all given with full citations, including year. Go to your local library, or anywhere that has a subscription to PROLA (prola.aps.org) (you can also get one if you join APS, but it can be expensive). There, you can get full text of all of the articles listed in this paper, and many many more. Though most will likely be beyond the grasp of someone without at least some treaining in physics, the early seminal papers are illuminating, EPR being an excellent example.
      Good luck studying, an
    • try the feynman lectures [amazon.com]. they are lectures from his actual class. much better than his books like 'six easy pieces' if you are actually trying to learn physics.

      these papers are usually only readable by people in that field. even other physicists don't understand papers outside of their field.

      • 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
    • The best place to learn, FOR FREE, from one of the best universities for science, goto MITs Open Courseware [mit.edu]. Enjoy!

    • Textbooks... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ramk13 ( 570633 )
      I'm sure it would be neat to go through and read a lot of these papers, but it's going to be very hard and very slow and you are going to have to have tons of background material at your side just to get the most basic meaning from them. I can't imagine reading papers in my field and getting much meaning from them before I went to college.

      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)

    by wrong un ( 552249 )
    One of the many reasons Kohn is highly referenced is due to the Kohn Variational Method* which is used in scattering calculations. A large number of papers have been written on scattering theory.

    * 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)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Kohn [ucsb.edu] is not that unknown, depending on where you went to college. He teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Having gone there, and been a physics student myself, he is quite well known. Though he bacame a little more well known after he received the Nobel Prize a few years back.

      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)

      by DarkMan ( 32280 )
      Density Functional theory owes a lot to Kohn. He didn't come upwith the idea (that the properties of a system can be defined by the location and density of electrons), but he was involved with almost everything to turn it from an interesting idea into a useful theory.

      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
      • Not true. DFT has been shown over and over again to fail at modelling weak, non-formally bonding systems. These include absolutely important things such as H-bonding, pi-interactions, vdW forces, etc. For THOSE systems, one has to go back to even earlier than the mid-60's, and go back to Moller - Plesset, and Perturbation Theory, the beast that that is. Density Functional Theory is popular for a couple of reasons, from what I have seen: (a) It is faster. (b) Everyone is in a mad rush to model enzymes, larg

  • Witten (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 02, 2004 @01:18PM (#9863845)
    Possibly of interest is the physicist Edward Witten. He's arguably the most famous string theorist. He won a Fields medal, which is like the mathematical equivalent of a Nobel Prize. Beyond his numerous original contributions to string theory, field theory, and gravity, he more recently started the so-called "second superstring revolution" leading to M-theory.

    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.

    • 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)

    by ravydavygravy ( 230429 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @01:22PM (#9863859) Homepage
    Here's something kinda similar for CS papers, curtosy of the excellent citeseer:

    http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/articles.html [psu.edu]

    Dave
    • Anyone else find it interesting that Gamma, Helm, Johnson and Vlissides (Design Patterns) is cited more frequently than any individual volume of Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, yet the latter is generally considered a more important book?
  • Why isn't Einstein listed ?

    Is this some form of popularity contest ?

  • zerg (Score:3)

    by Lord Omlette ( 124579 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @01:32PM (#9863895) Homepage
    The only part of a citation that matters is what it does for your Erdos Number.

  • bad data? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by abiessu ( 74684 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @01:41PM (#9863949) Journal
    "...the number of citations times the [average citation age]..."

    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.
    • I wouldn't say that. The point, I believe, is that by multiplying by the average citation age (and by 'citation age' I'm assuming here it means the time between the original paper and the citation of it), you bias the rankings toward the papers that continued being cited long after they were written, and against the 'flash in the pan' papers that got dozens of citations the year after they were done, and then were ignored.

  • Collect Them All! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Dang, makes me wish I hadn't traded my Kohn collector card for all those Hawking and Einstein cards with the action photos. :-(

    And I just got another Sir I. Newton card. Drat!

  • Bah... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by PrvtBurrito ( 557287 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @02:16PM (#9864134)
    These kinds of surveys should be left to the "Best places to live in america" and "the richest person in the world" lists and kept out of science. The quality of a paper does not make the scientist. This may be why Hawking is not on the list (I'm not a physicist/I don't know). That said, if scientists are evaluated only on the merits of their most significant papers we will all start to write "to the one paper" and science will suffer. Some scientists are very careful and disseminate their research through a series of papers, or even a career. The DNA paper (watson+crick) in biology would most certainly be the most significant, are either of them the most significant? I don't believe so. (I realize crick recently passed away) Perhaps the best use of informatics would be to do an analysis of physicists CV's. I think you'll find that there is more to being a scientist than publishing a good paper.

    • Re:Bah... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by antispam_ben ( 591349 )
      I think you'll find that there is more to being a scientist than publishing a good paper.

      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
      • I perhaps agree, but I have the impression that "publishing good papers" is the key to a scientist having a good career. This is a non-scientists view of science. Just because a scientist is famous does not necessarily correlate with the impact of his research. There are lots of researchers out there who affect science profoundly, but do not have the top 10 high impact paper. They generally have great CV's however.
  • I was under the impression (perhaps erroneously) that this
    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.
    • They left out review papers - RMP is all review papers, as are occasional papers in the other journlas. Review papers have very distinct citation histories that would completely mess up this sort of analysis (and yes, they are generally much more highly cited than regular papers).

  • Kohn, unknown to the general public (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Come on. Who hasn't heard of Koooooohhnnnnnn!

  • Obviously a bad measure (Score:3, Insightful)

    by hung_himself ( 774451 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @03:11PM (#9864414)
    The only conclusion that can be drawn from this "study" is that counting citations is a terrible measure of the relative merits of a paper. It may be OK for comparing average to good papers but obviously fails for evaluating the absolute best discoveries. One simple reason is that because more papers are published today you will get more citations of recent articles - esp since the older ones are established as "fact" and often not cited. If he had done something like normalized for the number of papers being published at the time weighted for how often the offspring were cited, it might have worked a bit better

    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.
  • Now that we have this list, we have an official metric for the performance requirements of an assistant professor seeking tenure at Harvard.
  • My God, the man must have been a supreme optimist.

  • First thing you do when reading the article is search it for your name. Doubly true when the article is about statistics of citations...

  • stephen hawking (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by r2q2 ( 50527 )
    Stephen Hawking doesn't make the list because his research is purely theoretical and can't be proved to be right or wrong.
  • Was the disparity between the areas you'd consider important if your only source of information was popular science (ie, most people until their couple years of college) and the areas considered important by scientists themselves. For example, my scientific "grandfather" (advisor's advisor) Ugo Fano wrote a tremendously significant paper that got ranked here at #3. Yet I'd never heard of the man before grad school.

  • Metaphysics? (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This MUST be the definitive example of pure metaphysics.

    Who cares, I wonder?

  • Historia Naturalis Principia Matematica (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Historia Naturalis Principia Matematica (Isaac Newton) is not mentioned.(something like "Matematical foundations of natural science" ) I think it is more important the those 100 combined.

    --Joonas Kekoni
  • I think this should be presented on VH1. They do lots of other "Top 100" Lists - 100 Hottest Men in Film, 100 Greatest Guitar Players, etc. It would be really entertaining to see how many people would watch the Top 100 Physics Papers just because they couldn't find anything else to watch (in addition to the people who would watch it because they're actually interested).

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