What’s the most extremely cited paper within the scientific literature? Chances are high slim that the majority researchers know the reply. It seems to be a 1951 publication within the Journal of Organic Chemistry describing an assay to find out the quantity of protein in an answer1. That has been cited greater than 350,000 instances within the Net of Science (WoS), a database that features 98 million papers courting again to 1900.
In actual fact, many papers on organic laboratory methods dominate the checklist of probably the most extremely cited papers of all time, based on knowledge supplied to Nature by the multinational agency Clarivate, which owns the WoS. The highest-100 checklist additionally contains papers on synthetic intelligence (AI), analysis software program and statistical strategies.
The most-cited papers of the twenty-first century
The present checklist is an replace of 1 that Nature revealed in 2014, which was topped by instruments utilized in cell and molecular biology from the Nineteen Fifties and Nineteen Seventies (see Nature 514, 550–553; 2014). About half of the papers in that prime 100 have now modified as citations to newer papers have soared. In 2014, it took about 12,000 citations to make the top-100 checklist; now, greater than 30,000 citations are required. (This refers to citations from papers within the WoS ‘Core Assortment’, used right here to permit comparability with 2014.)
Nature’s information staff additionally analysed information from two massive analysis databases — Dimensions and OpenAlex — as a result of their public-facing variations enable analyses again to 1900. These give barely totally different rankings and higher quotation counts, however usually characteristic related papers. (Full particulars of the top-100 lists, together with an evaluation of median rankings throughout three databases, are within the Supplementary information.)
The entire lists are nonetheless headed by the 1951 paper. However a paper2 by Microsoft researchers from a 2015 convention on AI is already ranked fifth, when median rankings are analysed throughout three databases (or seventh within the WoS alone; see ‘Prime ten cited papers’).
General, 16 papers from the twenty-first century now make it into the all-time prime 50, though they’ve had a lot much less time than older papers to garner citations. Software program descriptions and computer-aided findings have made notable rises within the rating. (Bibliometricians level out that citations must be corrected for a paper’s 12 months of publication and analysis area to make truthful comparisons between disparate works.)
Rising annual volumes of analysis papers — which means extra references every year — and the higher visibility of that analysis on-line and on social media would possibly clarify how some fashionable papers have shot up the charts, says Paul Wouters, a retired scientometrics researcher at Leiden College within the Netherlands.
