The top 100 papers: Papers That Are Most Cited Aren’t Most Famous

[jakeXT]

It may never win a Nobel Prize, but a 1951 paper describing a way to detect protein levels in a solution tops a new list of the 100 most cited research papers.

Fifty years ago, the American scientist Eugene Garfield started the Science Citation Index, the first organized effort to track citations in scientific literature. To mark the anniversary, the journal Nature asked Thomson Reuters, which now owns the index, to list the 100 most highly cited papers.

Neither Einstein’s papers on relativity nor Watson and Crick’s discovery of DNA’s double-helix structure made the cut. Instead, the list is dominated by papers describing methods or software that have become essential in their field. The top three papers are biochemical techniques for quantifying the amount of protein in a solution.

While oft-cited papers are certainly influential, said Richard Van Noorden, a co-author of the Nature article, being highly cited may have more to do with the “vagaries of citation practice” than scientific effect.

“In some fields (especially biochemistry), it’s traditional to cite foundational work,” he wrote in an email. “In others less so — the work may be used but not formally cited.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/04/science/papers-that-are-most-cited-arent-most-famous.html?_r=0

http://www.nature.com/news/the-top-100-papers-1.16224?WT.mc_id=FBK_NatureNews

[eppur_se_muova]

1. Comprehensive reviews tend to be heavily cited ...

until the next comprehensive review(s) in that field supercede them. Reviews need not include any original work by the author(s).