The top 100 articles and the paper mountain
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The credibility of peer-reviewed scientific publications relies mainly on the well-established system of citations, by which authors acknowledge the source of their ideas. Citations are often used as a rough measure of a paper’s importance. In 1964, Eugene Garfield founded the Science Citation Index (SCI) to track citations in the scientific literature. The larger version of SCI (Science Citation Index Expanded), now under Thomson Reuters’s banner, covers a corpus of 58 million items published in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in more than 6,500 journals across 150 disciplines.
A few months ago, Nature and Thomson Reuters listed the 100 most cited papers of all time. Surprisingly, this list revealed that many of the world’s most famous papers do not make the cut (you won’t find any of the four Annus mirabilis papers published by Einstein in 1905). Yet the vast majority of the articles in the top 100 describe experimental methods that have become essential in their fields. For example, the most cited work, with more than 300,000 citations, is a 1951 paper (published by Lowry, Rosebrough, Farr, & Randall) presenting a method to determine the amount of protein in a solution.
If that corpus of 58 million items were scaled to Mount Kilimanjaro, then the 100 most cited papers would represent just 1 centimeter at the peak!
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