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Top 100 Papers in Physics Ranked
Rob Carr writes "What do physicists care about most? Who are the greatest minds of our time? What physics papers have had the greatest impact? Sidney Redner attempts to answer that question by looking at the citations of all journals in the Physical Review Journals since 1893. He ranked the top 100 papers based on their 'impact': the number of citations times the average age of the citations. Einstein's Relativity papers, which were not in Physical Review journals, are the most stunning absence. 'Fan Favorites' are there - Einstein does make the list for the Einstein Podolsky Rosen paper. Feynman, Dirac, Bethe, Wheeler are on the list. Stephen Hawking does not make the list. Yet Nobel Prize winner Walter Kohn, who is virtually unknown to the general public, is an author on five of the 100 papers, including the top two and one of the top 15 'hot' papers. The paper goes into the statistics of the citations, a fascinating area in it's own right. Some papers make an immediate splash, while others might wait 50 years before their importance becomes apparent. The vast majority die a quick and quiet death. It's tempting to wonder if Redner's paper conclusively proves Sturgeon's Law."
Anyone find a non-pdf version. Here is the list of top 100 papers in text form, converted using pdftotext. Skip down a bit for the actual list of the top 100 papers.
Note: I wasn't questioning Walter Kohn. I was questioning the theory behind the original article. How does counting citations become classified as "research".
Possibly of interest is the physicist Edward Witten. He's arguably the most famous string theorist. He won a Fields medal, which is like the mathematical equivalent of a Nobel Prize. Beyond his numerous original contributions to string theory, field theory, and gravity, he more recently started the so-called "second superstring revolution" leading to M-theory.
In fact, based on a study of papers published between 1981 and 1997, he was the most-cited physicist in the world: in that period, he published 138 papers, with 23,235 citations: each paper he published was cited an average of 168 times. (The next closest to Witten was the semiconductor physicist Gossard, with 16,994 citations of 419 papers.) Most physicists would be overjoyed to publish one paper cited over 100 times.
Here's something kinda similar for CS papers, curtosy of the excellent citeseer:
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/articles.html
Dave
The similarity is what caught my eye. "Impact Factors" have had an interesting effect on medicine: fighting has increased for the "right" journal to publish an article in seems to have increased, tenure, salary, and position can be affected by ranking, and I suspect it's had undue influence on what is researched. As Niven would say, "Think of it as evolution in action." Evolution, unfortunately, has a nasty habit of getting caught in local minima or trapped by past choices.
If this type of ranking catches on, physics will experience similar effects - both good and bad.
BTW: I had a copy of a VH1 joke in the draft of this article, but I cut it out. I'm glad - it works far better as a department. Short and funny always beats a long setup.
This sig seemed like a good idea at the time....
The papers listed are all given with full citations, including year. Go to your local library, or anywhere that has a subscription to PROLA (prola.aps.org) (you can also get one if you join APS, but it can be expensive). There, you can get full text of all of the articles listed in this paper, and many many more. Though most will likely be beyond the grasp of someone without at least some treaining in physics, the early seminal papers are illuminating, EPR being an excellent example.
Good luck studying, and just because you're not a physics major now doesn't mean you can't become one with a little hard work if you want to!
"What the masochist doesn't know can't hurt him."
try the feynman lectures. they are lectures from his actual class. much better than his books like 'six easy pieces' if you are actually trying to learn physics.
these papers are usually only readable by people in that field. even other physicists don't understand papers outside of their field.