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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."
If you're interested in network theory in general, and as it applies to scientific collaborations, you could do much worse than checking out Mark Newman's publications, in particular this, this, and this.
As has been pointed out, it's possible for a paper to lie undiscovered for decades before being revived; Mandel being the most obvious example. I'd suggest that papers didn't die; they're in hibernation.
Oh, and am I the only one that chortled at the fact that this paper, which lists the 100 most cited papers, had only 26 references?
Which says, "90% of everything is crap". A good test would be to look at the citations of the famous papers. Do they just cite other top 100 papers? Or did the authors of the best papers learn from the work of their less famous colleagues?
So, someone does some research where they count the number of citations and then do some statistical analysis of it. I do recall reading similar articles in Grad School. A professor of such-and-such would count the number of citations in his or her field of study and publish a paper on it. So, if my memory is still correct, it's been done before in fields other than Physics (I wish I could remember what fields).
Does this type of research really tell us anything? To me, all this tells us is that many other researchers spent alot of money either trying to prove or disprove Walter Kohn's theories. What this article doesn't tell us is whether or not Walter Kohn's theories are valid in the first place.
At least it's kind of interesting. Well, interesting if you enjoy the study of splitting atoms.
pretty much every one of high energy particle physics papers published from Tevatron/FNAL and LEP/CERN data will cite those...
i guess their work wasn't in the papers scanned...
i'm kind of glad, as a PhD physicist and as a bit of a snob, that public popularity != scientific merit... you don't have to be known in public to have been a great physicist and also, just because you are know in public doesn't mean you were a great physicist.
for example, feynman no doubt did some great physics, but he gets much, MUCH greater recognition over two other guys who did the same work (tomonaga and schwinger, they shared the nobel prize) because he was a very accessible guy, a great speaker/teacher and had an amazingly outgoing personality. rarity for a physicist, indeed... :P
I think it might say more about the most copied idea... a lot of times citations are made to basically restate someone else's idea, not that it particularly has to do with the researcher's idea, but as a refresher. To get that kinda info, you'd need to build a tree of some kind, right?
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This is absolutely wonderful.
I am a high school dropout.
Recently I developed a real passion for physics and have been reading introductory books like Hawking's Brief History and Feynman's Six Easy. This inspired me to self-teach myself calculus and algebra. I am just finishing up my high school via correspondence now and (don't want to brag) but I'm doing extremely well.
For me, interest in the sciences and math took a long time to come out but now it has. The only problem is I have very little to turn to (I'm not a physics major).
This article is truly one of the best I've found on slashdot so far. The only thing better would be having the papers in chronological order so I could learn them one at a time and know where to begin!
(Mind you many of these will be for graduate-level people but I'm sure many can be read by the layman)
Thanks!
He's famous at least in Pasadena (where he taught at Caltech for several years); there are photographs of him all over the place and even a Feynman collage on the wall of a clothing store.
I used to read Caltizzle. I was a lot cooler than you.
Kohn is not that unknown, depending on where you went to college. He teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Having gone there, and been a physics student myself, he is quite well known. Though he bacame a little more well known after he received the Nobel Prize a few years back.
I had the chance to meet him (he was never my teacher, nor was i lucky enough to work in his research group) in an elevator once, we talked on the ride down. He is extremely nice and articulate.
Actually, special relativity was widely read about. The only problem was that it was published in, I think, the Annals of Physics (the actual title is German).
Einstein's GR, however, was much less widely read, even though its importance was widely recognized. If somebody published a paper in quantum mechanics in the 1930s, a lot of people read it because their work was contingent on it. GR, however, just sort of popped out of nowhere, and since it hadn't existed before, Einstein's future audience was still in graduate school.
These kinds of surveys should be left to the "Best places to live in america" and "the richest person in the world" lists and kept out of science. The quality of a paper does not make the scientist. This may be why Hawking is not on the list (I'm not a physicist/I don't know). That said, if scientists are evaluated only on the merits of their most significant papers we will all start to write "to the one paper" and science will suffer. Some scientists are very careful and disseminate their research through a series of papers, or even a career. The DNA paper (watson+crick) in biology would most certainly be the most significant, are either of them the most significant? I don't believe so. (I realize crick recently passed away) Perhaps the best use of informatics would be to do an analysis of physicists CV's. I think you'll find that there is more to being a scientist than publishing a good paper.
Laboratree - Scientific collaboration based on OpenSocial.
-Richard Feynman (1967)
Come on. Who hasn't heard of Koooooohhnnnnnn!
Since no one has mentioned it: the Kohn in question won the Nobel Prize in 1998 and is still active and teaching at UC Santa Barbara (confirming his good taste as well as Physics acumen).
His web page is at http://www.physics.ucsb.edu/~kohn/
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Density Functional theory owes a lot to Kohn. He didn't come upwith the idea (that the properties of a system can be defined by the location and density of electrons), but he was involved with almost everything to turn it from an interesting idea into a useful theory.
Because he (along with Sham) provided the Kohn-Sham equations, pretty much every paper that does anything to DFT (as oposed to things with DFT, but even then, many do) cite one or two of his papers.
The reason DFT kicks arse as a calculation scheme is that it is proven to be able to be as good as any other method. It's also cheap to calculate, because it is localised (you only need to examing the vicinty of an area to calulate, as opposed to QM theories which require youto compare a spot with everything. Repeat (for both DFT and QM) for all points).
It, like all such methods, has it's foibles, but a good DFT schema (it's actually a class of methods, rather than a specific single one), can be as good in computational chemistry as things that take 2 to 5 times as long.
For example, while I am quite familiar with DFT and have read most (if not all) of the Kohn papers mentioned in the article, I would not have guessed he would have placed so high.
:-)
I'm a quantum chemist myself. I have to say I wasn't that surprized at all.
If you look at the list of Most cited chemists John Pople is #2. Basically everyone who's contributed to Gaussian is up there.
(Note to non-chemists: Gaussian is the most used quantum chemistry software)
All these lists are strongly biased towards method-developers, since they get a citation from every paper which uses their method. However, it doesn't necessarily mean much though.
I personally wrote a program which a lot of people use, yet it doesn't really do anything that remarkable. It was just more user-friendly than the competition. So I did put in for a (crap, of course) publication out of it. Unsurprizingly, it's the most cited paper I've written. And the one with the least scientific value!
Was the disparity between the areas you'd consider important if your only source of information was popular science (ie, most people until their couple years of college) and the areas considered important by scientists themselves. For example, my scientific "grandfather" (advisor's advisor) Ugo Fano wrote a tremendously significant paper that got ranked here at #3. Yet I'd never heard of the man before grad school.
Historia Naturalis Principia Matematica (Isaac Newton) is not mentioned.(something like "Matematical foundations of natural science" ) I think it is more important the those 100 combined.
--Joonas Kekoni