The Most Highly Cited Scientific Papers of All Time 81
bmahersciwriter writes Citation is the common way that scientists nod to the important and foundational work that preceded their own and the number of times a particular paper is cited is often used as a rough measure of its impact. So what are the most highly cited papers in the past century plus of scientific research? Is it the determination of DNA's structure? The identification of rapid expansion in the Universe? No. The top 100 most cited papers are actually a motley crew of methods, data resources and software tools that through usability, practicality and a little bit of luck have propelled them to the top of an enormous corpus of scientific literature.
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Re:When is something well-known enough to not cite (Score:5, Informative)
I would have assumed journals would let you err on the side of caution and simply remove your citation if it were unnecessary, but apparently citing too much can block approval.
Nowadays, most journals will expect the author to provide a camera-ready copy. They don't do any editing or typesetting anymore, they just handle peer-review and publication. Authors can modify papers following suggestions from peer review, which may include suggestions on citations. I think Nature and Science still to their own typesetting, and may commission better illustrations, but that's a rare exception. In nearly all cases where the paper has been accepted, the author has the final say about the details (within reason, of course).
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Re:When is something well-known enough to not cite (Score:5, Informative)
The editor still molds the submissions into a house style before it goes to the printer; the author isn't expected to do all the typesetting himself.
As usual those blasted physicists have it all figured out, especially in HEP. No one is expected to do typesetting: it is a process that computers excel at. Instead you provide the document source in REVTEX4 (a largeish subset of LaTeX). The journal replaces your style file with their own and it's done.
Also, since articles are being written in English by non-native speakers, many journals will send articles on to a native English speaker to make them sound more natural (as a grad student I picked up a lot of work this way) before publication.
Never seen that personally, but I'm not in linguistics. Instead, I've had (clearly non native) reviews complaining incorrectly about English constuctions that I've used, and recommending I get a native English speaker to review it. The nerve of that is quite astonishing and it would be funny if such reviewers didn't generally revel in making the life of authors as miserable as possible.
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I've had (clearly non native) reviews complaining incorrectly about English constuctions that I've used, and recommending I get a native English speaker to review it. The nerve of that is quite astonishing and it would be funny if such reviewers didn't generally revel in making the life of authors as miserable as possible.
You know I have lots of friends who work with native speakers to make their texts easier to read, strange constructs is just one thing they remoev.
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You know I have lots of friends who work with native speakers to make their texts easier to read, strange constructs is just one thing they remoev.
I'm a native speaker and I have no objection to removing strange constructs. However, the construct was not strange. It was co-authored with another native speaker and a fluent non native speaker. Neither of them could figure out what this guy thought was wrong with the construct.
Re:When is something well-known enough to not cite (Score:5, Interesting)
Always bad to reply to onesself, but [citation needed blah blah]
Here's a nice article on the problems of peer review (starting on page 2), iuncluding the problem of non native speakers trying to correct native ones:
http://www.bmva.org/_media/bmv... [bmva.org]
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I've had issues with this, although mostly with people not groking that British English is a valid form of the language. It wasn't even an American journal, it was French!
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Well you know how the French and British get along.
The MS Word Grammar Checker (Score:2)
Thank you, Melinda French Gates . . .
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Typesetting isn't a process computers excel at. LaTeX is good, but not nearly as good as a good designer equipped with InDesign and loads and loads of time. It's faster and cheaper, yes, and certainly good enough for most academic journals (probably not Nature). Unfortunately, it also offers nothing (except decent typesetting) for fields that don't deal much with maths, whereas Microsoft Word offers a few nice tools, is somewhat easy to use, and has rubbish typesetting.
Re:When is something well-known enough to not cite (Score:4, Informative)
Typesetting isn't a process computers excel at. LaTeX is good, but not nearly as good as a good designer equipped with InDesign and loads and loads of time.
Not sure I agree. For something that isn't in TeX's general area then yes. However, a good designer with TeX and loads of time can do a very very good job. TeX does an excellent job of the basics like kerning (especially the modern variants which do micro kerning and stuff), spacing, breaking and so on. It also does a much, much better job than most people can do and certainly given a time budget it does a much better job than almost all people.
It's faster and cheaper, yes, and certainly good enough for most academic journals (probably not Nature).
I believe you are actually mistaken about that. I think they actually do use it internally.
Unfortunately, it also offers nothing (except decent typesetting) for fields that don't deal much with maths, whereas Microsoft Word offers a few nice tools, is somewhat easy to use, and has rubbish typesetting.
Well, it offers automatic cross referencing, with almost every conceivable variant of bibliographic styles. It also does that in a reliable and bug free manner, not something I've observed with word. Biologists spend an inordinate amount of time battling with reference managers.
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Yeah, BibTeX is more reliable than EndNote, but it's cumbersome to use and extremely poor at, well, managing references. Perhaps there are frontends with dupe control, sorting by arbitrary fields, grouping, etc., but then you're into the old Unix problem of having the choice of a gazillion applications that do one thing each, usually poorly, and with different combinations everywhere. A monstrosity like EndNote does pretty much everything you can want from a reference manager (much of it in a confusing mann
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Yeah, BibTeX is more reliable than EndNote, but it's cumbersome to use and extremely poor at, well, managing references. Perhaps there are frontends with dupe control, sorting by arbitrary fields, grouping, etc., but then you're into the old Unix problem of having the choice of a gazillion applications that do one thing each, usually poorly, and with different combinations everywhere.
How do you mean? Is this for some sort of display purpose other than in the bibliography of the paper? BibTeX is mostly just
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How do you mean? Is this for some sort of display purpose other than in the bibliography of the paper? BibTeX is mostly just the database and tools for turning that plus a document into a bibliography. Beyond that it doesn't do any "management".
Exactly. The ability to view the database, sorted in any order imaginable, or ordered into groups, either manually or through live searches. It's a very useful tool when writing a review with hundreds or references, and is nice to have even if you've got just a few dozens.
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Exactly. The ability to view the database, sorted in any order imaginable, or ordered into groups, either manually or through live searches. It's a very useful tool when writing a review with hundreds or references, and is nice to have even if you've got just a few dozens.
Hm, maybe I live is a web search world, but I never found myself wishing for that kind of thing. It tended to be I'd read a paper finding it through web searches, on the website of a researcher I knew to be be important in the field, or ci
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Hm, maybe I live is a web search world, but I never found myself wishing for that kind of thing. It tended to be I'd read a paper finding it through web searches, on the website of a researcher I knew to be be important in the field, or cited elsewhere.
But that's just not practical when you want a current overview of a huge field. With EndNote, you typically dump the entire list of search results from the database, and then start reading abstracts (included in the reference file), sorting relevant from irrelevant, and then download PDFs to read (which are then stored along with the references). It's a research tool and a retrieval tool. BibTeX isn't.
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But that's just not practical when you want a current overview of a huge field.
How huge us huge? It was fine for writing a thesis. It was fine for writing some decently long literature reviews.
With EndNote, you typically dump the entire list of search results from the database, and then start reading abstracts (included in the reference file), sorting relevant from irrelevant, and then download PDFs to read (which are then stored along with the references). It's a research tool and a retrieval tool. BibTeX
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You use Google for research? Seriously?
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You use Google for research? Seriously?
How is that worse than using endnote?
And yes, I do. They have this quite useful tool called google scholar. For many papers you can easily follow chains of references, reading the papers citing the ones of interest, and easily looking up the ones cited. They also often have links to open PDFs so you don't have to bugger around trying to find how to get access to some journal or other which won't authenticate properly.
But yes, these days google features prominantly in a
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Re:When is something well-known enough to not cite (Score:4, Informative)
It is the field of biology that you are talking about? That's certainly not the case for my own field (linguistics). The editor still molds the submissions into a house style before it goes to the printer; the author isn't expected to do all the typesetting himself.
Ok, my experience is mostly with computer science, math and physics. Typically, you write your paper in LaTeX with a style provided by the publisher. LaTeX does the actual typesetting, of course. Some journals also have Word templates, but that's much rarer.
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True for IEEE (Score:3)
After getting the final submission rejected 6 times. (The first failure was because it was PDF4, and they wanted PDF5 ... as if the couldn't up convert ... so I tried giving them the original source for them to use, but giving them ODF and DOC files resulted in font screwups ... so I tried generating the PDF through other mechanisms ... but they complained I had bookmarks (none of which showed up in Abobe Acrobat Professional) ... then their website said I had sent them too many PDFs (3), so I had to use
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Nope, it had been approved, went through peer review (and was accepted) without a single mention of that. I was going through some system to check to see if my paper was formatted correctly when I gave up. I was told that wasn't even the system to submit the paper to.
And I've never published in EE before ... the workshop was 'Solar Astronomy Big Data', and I've only dealt with journals from solar physics, science informatics / data science, and library & information science. There's always been an ex
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Maybe the PP works in Computer Science. In CS, it is common for authors to typeset the entire paper themselves using a style file provided by the conference or journal.
We actually *prefer* typesetting papers ourselves because our manuscripts are all in Latex anyway. Journals that want to prepare their own camera-ready copies (in particular, non-CS journals) often have trouble accepting Latex source are are accustomed to taking all of their submissions in Word...
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Out of curiosity, what journals are you submitting to that require "camera ready" copy? I'm aware of very few in the life or physical sciences, and most of those aren't exactly top tier.
Most journals expect the text (including citations) in a "standard" format, I'm aware of none that won't accept any semi-recent version of word (.doc/.docx), most accept PDF, many will accept RTF, a few will accept TEX (maybe most if your field is physics or math). They generally want each figure as a separate file, either v
Re:When is something well-known enough to not cite (Score:5, Informative)
Its a good example. Crick and Watsons work neither discovered DNA not did it explain how the information is stored. What is actually in the paper is a model for the helix structure, which is totally irrelevant in the majority of cases that you talk about DNA.
On the shoulders of giants (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:On the shoulders of giants (Score:5, Interesting)
I second this. A lot of attention gets paid (understandably) to those researchers who discover some new particle, material, species etc, but science is utterly dependent on the brilliant people who are prepared to work in the background on less "sexy" topics.
X-Ray crystallography is a brilliant example, without all the work being done by brilliant experimentors like Elspeh Garmen who have worked so hard to make other people's discoveries and inventions possible.
As the biologist Steve Jones once put it, "Science is the last refuge of the mediocre". People focus on the geniuses but it's really a massive collaborative effort by a lot of actually pretty ordinary people who just like to investigate the unknown.
The BBC Radio 4 programme The Life Scientific had a great interview with Garmen who was very humble about a career that has had a massive impact on so many areas of research - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programme... [bbc.co.uk]
It's a really fantastic series if you want to get an idea of what real scientists actually do, and how they got to where they are in their careers.
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The same is true of every human endeavor which is why the whole concept of IP is ridiculous. Innovation is always around the edges whether it is music, art, engineering, or science. People learn about what current technology and knowledge is and move the boundaries a bit. We have this hero worship culture that likes to put certain people on pedestals as if they were geniuses working in total isolation. But notice the majority of these advances come from people in advanced cultures?
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Or more recently Phil Jones the target of the "climategate" beat up who spent more than two decades painstakingly gathering paper/microfiche recor
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Would printing the 1,5 meter stack of most influential papers be a reasonable alternative to printing the 109.91 GB Survival Library http://tech.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org] ?
Yes.
Fun fact (Score:5, Interesting)
Alan Turing's most widely cited paper is in biology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chemical_Basis_of_Morphogenesis
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Does that make it Turing-complete?
Clickbait harder (Score:1)
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I skimmed the article. If it wanted to be clickbait it would have mentioned the 2nd most cited paper deals with cleavage and was published in the 70s... Look at the info graphic if you want to see it.
Almost all of the top 10 deal with proteins. I can't tell if that's a good thing or not. Lots of interesting papers or tons of bullshit? The most cited paper has 305,148 citations! It's from 1951.
Link to #1 (Score:5, Informative)
2) Commentary, 2004: http://www.jbc.org/content/280... [jbc.org]
3) Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... [wikipedia.org]
"The Lowry protein assay is a biochemical assay for determining the total level of protein in a solution. The total protein concentration is exhibited by a color change of the sample solution in proportion to protein concentration, which can then be measured using colorimetric techniques. It is named for the biochemist Oliver H. Lowry who developed the reagent in the 1940s. His 1951 paper describing the technique is the most-highly cited paper ever in the scientific literature, cited over 200,000 times."
The method combines the reactions of copper ions with the peptide bonds under alkaline conditions (the Biuret test) with the oxidation of aromatic protein residues. The Lowry method is best used with protein concentrations of 0.01–1.0 mg/mL and is based on the reaction of Cu+, produced by the oxidation of peptide bonds, with Folin–Ciocalteu reagent (a mixture of phosphotungstic acid and phosphomolybdic acid in the Folin–Ciocalteu reaction). The reaction mechanism is not well understood, but involves reduction of the Folin–Ciocalteu reagent and oxidation of aromatic residues (mainly tryptophan, also tyrosine). Experiments have shown that cysteine is also reactive to the reagent. Therefore, cysteine residues in protein probably also contribute to the absorbance seen in the Lowry Assay. [3] The concentration of the reduced Folin reagent is measured by absorbance at 750 nm.[4] As a result, the total concentration of protein in the sample can be deduced from the concentration of Trp and Tyr residues that reduce the Folin–Ciocalteu reagent.
The method was first proposed by Lowry in 1951. The Bicinchoninic acid assay and the Hartree–Lowry assay are subsequent modifications of the original Lowry procedure.
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Like RFCs (Score:1)
Probably the most commonly cited RFC is 2119, "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels", which has saved a lot of time over the years.
That RFC was only published in 1997 as well.
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RFC 2119 is pretty basic stuff. You may wish to extend it with RFC 6919 [rfc-editor.org], which could include additional language which you must use for clarity (but we know you won't).
results from different practices among disciplines (Score:5, Informative)
Citation practice (along with author ordering) is very different among the disciplines. In life sciences, there's a tendency to cite papers with lab techniques, as a shorthand for some complex procedure "The cultures were processed according to Smith[1] followed by the Jones assay[2]".
In engineering, there tends to be less of a tendency to cite a paper with methodological info: Very few people using an FFT cite the Cooley-Tukey paper; likewise, someone talking about using an ADC for sampled data isn't going to cite Nyquist, even if they say "the sampling rate was 5 time the Nyquist frequency". Likewise, in engineering, you don't see: The dice were attached to the substrate using a eutectic mixture of lead and tin as recommended by Agricola in "de re Metallica".
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CS and math papers are more like life sciences in this regard. They cite bullshit from 30 years ago that was made completely obsolete by another paper before the author started studying the material. But [1] they [2] still [3] cite [3] anything[4] halfway[5] relevant [6] in the intro [7] paragraphs [8].
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In engineering, there tends to be less of a tendency to cite a paper with methodological info: Very few people using an FFT cite the Cooley-Tukey paper; likewise, someone talking about using an ADC for sampled data isn't going to cite Nyquist, even if they say "the sampling rate was 5 time the Nyquist frequency". Likewise, in engineering, you don't see: The dice were attached to the substrate using a eutectic mixture of lead and tin as recommended by Agricola in "de re Metallica".
Yes and no. In computer science experienced authors rely on a common and rather broad knowledge base when writing their publications. There is a tradition not to cite things which are part of the common knowledge. I would not cite just because I was using the FFT, unless I was doing something out of the ordinary with it which actually requires understanding all the details of the original publication.
A very common sign of an inexperienced author is sloppy references. Typically there are too many references
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True and particularily true since researchers in some fields started to cheat the system by cross-citing each others, fragment the results to publish more than one paper when everything should have been published in a single article, etc.
Also, the study should normalize in some way for the total amount of publications since this number increase, the number of opportunities a given article can be cited is increasing as well. There is then a bias favoring publications that occured during the last two decades.
Text book knowledge. (Score:2)
In Science, Engineerin
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A citation is nothing more than a note that you used this particular method and rather than include your own justification of the accuracy of that method, you cite the papers you need. They are basically a scientific "include".
For any technique where you don't need to include the obvious, you won't bother to cite them either. Unless you're purely citing for the sake of it. In the same way that you don't cite the papers that your citations do, it's pointless if nobody is going to question the accuracy of
methods, not new discoveries, win (Score:4, Interesting)
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It looks like the majority of the top 20 most cited papers cover new methods or tools (e.g., a new lab technique or a new software program), not new fundamental scientific discoveries (e.g., the structure of DNA or expansion of the universe). I guess this isn't really surprising, but it is interesting. One could conclude that scientists who want to make a major impact on their field should spend their time inventing new methods for doing fundamental research and let other scientists actually do the research.
I think something else is going on.
The point of science is discovery so if you make some great discovery people start investigating it. With every new paper someone is pushing further into the unknown, eventually enough people have built on your discovery si that when someone wants to build on your work they don't cite your paper, they cite the paper that cited your paper.
But with methods the bigger concern is simply getting things done. So you may get fewer advancements because fewer people develop them an
Pretty obvious (Score:2)
If you discovered a new gene responsible for Alzheimer's you would get cited in a lot of medical journals, but devise a new and particularly useful computational method (i.e a new and particularly useful linear system solver or numerical integration scheme) and you can have an impact on nearly every scientific field.
Data & Software Citation. (Score:2)
The article itself never mention 'data resources' that I saw, but there's a problem in many fields that the standards are to cite the 'first results' paper for that data ... for which the results portion may have already been disproved or otherwise be crap. There are
Glaring omission. (Score:3)
So some of the most widely used scientific discoveries never get cited.
That explains why my work did not make it to the top of this flawed metric.
Here is another link that is more readable. In a more easily readable form [komplexify.com] Candlestickmaker, S., and Helpit, Canna E. 1955, Compositio Math., 237, 476.
Giftcourt. M. F. 1956, J. Symbolic Logic, 237, 476.
Nostradamus, M. 1955, Centuries (Lyons).
Pythagoras — 520, in: Euclid — 300, Elements, Book I, Prop. 47 (Athens).
Shopwalker, M., and Salesperson, F. 1955, Heredity, 237, 476.
Errata (Score:3)
Pythagoras — 520, in: Euclid — 300, Elements, Book I, Prop. 47 (Athens).
The citation is probably wrong. Although we don't know exactly where Euclid's Elements were written, he lived in Alexandria and not in Athens. The oldest known complete edition was also edited in Alexandria.
Yes, I'm a citation nazi.
Yep... not surprising at all if you think about it (Score:1)
As quoted above, science is a shoulders-of-giants scheme, and I'm glad to see that the most-cited papers are not about the results of science, but rather good techniques for _doing_ science - well-considered, well-tested shoulders to stand on.
Nature is focusing our attention on citations... (Score:1)
Claude Shannon? (Score:2)
Nothing of his seems to have made the list. Sort of surprising.
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Interesting. I've never cited anything in the top 100, but even I've cited Claude Shannon.
This should be the best paper of all time (Score:2)
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm... [acm.org]