Researchers advance by standing on the shoulders of giants, to paraphrase Isaac Newton. So, which analysis giants are nonetheless getting cited often immediately?
A technique of answering that’s to find out which articles seem most frequently within the reference lists of immediately’s analysis papers. Nature requested three bibliometricians who examine patterns of references in scientific publications to dig into the info. They churned via tens of thousands and thousands of references cited in all of the papers printed in 2023, essentially the most full 12 months accessible in analysis repositories on the time.
The researchers discovered that well-liked twenty-first-century papers on subjects similar to synthetic intelligence (AI), scientific software program and strategies to enhance the standard of analysis dominate immediately’s reference lists. However some research printed earlier than 2000 are nonetheless closely acknowledged even now (see ‘Which articles are referenced essentially the most?’).
Finding out the cited references of a big assortment of papers supplies a basis for locating the mental roots of a discipline, says Robin Haunschild, a scientometrician on the Max Planck Institute for Strong State Analysis in Stuttgart, Germany.
“This reveals the actually necessary papers for a group,” provides Lutz Bornmann, a sociologist of science on the Max Planck Society in Munich, Germany. Bornmann and Haunschild, along with Andreas Thor, a pc scientist on the Leipzig College of Utilized Sciences, Germany, carried out the technically difficult evaluation for Nature. They relied on a modified model of software program that Bornmann and Thor, with others, launched in 2016 to assist researchers to discover cited references1.
To compile a listing of the most-cited references in publications immediately, Nature took the median rankings throughout three databases (see the scientometricians’ methodology2 and Supplementary information).
AI influencers
The evaluation reveals that work on AI printed previously decade was referenced essentially the most. Nature discovered the same sample in a associated exploration of the most-cited papers published in the twenty-first century.
The most-cited papers of the twenty-first century
However some older AI research have been nonetheless quotation magnets in 2023. One paper3 printed in 1997 — which describes an early neural-network structure for modelling languages known as lengthy short-term reminiscence (LSTM) — was the tenth most cited in 2023. Due to their effectivity, LSTMs stay well-liked for processing some knowledge. Jürgen Schmidhuber, a pioneer of AI and one of many authors of the 1997 paper, who’s now at King Abdullah College of Science and Expertise, Thuwal, Saudi Arabia, says that not all outdated AI papers get the identical recognition, partly as a result of these articles put ahead concepts earlier than they have been possible.
“Sadly, the sector of AI and machine studying is rife with plagiarism,” he says, “and a number of the most well-known papers truly did not cite the unique work printed when compute was thousands and thousands of occasions dearer than immediately.”
Supplies excessive
Remarkably, one other analysis paper4 written almost three a long time in the past was the fourth most referenced work in papers printed in 2023. In 1996, three researchers at Tulane College in New Orleans, Louisiana, printed a intelligent, quick approximation that may very well be utilized in software program to assist researchers to calculate the interactions of electrons in supplies, as a method to perceive the supplies’ properties.
“The citations simply grew and grew and grew,” says physicist Kieron Burke, who co-authored the article with physicists John Perdew and Matthias Ernzerhof. In truth, one-quarter of the paper’s whole citations have been garnered previously two years, based on the Dimensions analysis database, and additionally it is the fourth most-cited paper of all time (see ‘These are the most-cited research papers of all time’).
