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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."
Surely he was joking.
Yeah, but it's just Phys Rev. A lot of cool stuff happens that never gets published in Phys Rev. Sometimes, it's a talk at a symposium that is published and makes a big splash.
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?
stuff |
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!
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.
One of the many reasons Kohn is highly referenced is due to the Kohn Variational Method* which is used in scattering calculations. A large number of papers have been written on scattering theory.
:-)
* The Hulthen Kohn variational methods are a family of variational principles based on the stationary properties of the reactance or Kohn matrix K.
~
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 only part of a citation that matters is what it does for your Erdos Number.
[o]_O
"...the number of citations times the [average citation age]..."
It seems to me that this nullifies the comparison in some regards. If you rank by this number DEscending, you get a few old papers with a lot of citations... possibly just because they're old. If you rank by this number Ascending, you get just the newest papers without significant numbers of citations. It might be better to rank by either total numbers of citations or "the number of citations *divided* by the average citation age", and use a DEscending rank. This way, recent works get a 'fair' (or 'fairer') comparison against older works.
Let S_n = {nst+us+vt : s,t in Z \ {0}, u,v in {-1,1}}. For all n in Z where |n| > 2, Z \ S_n is infinite... right?
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....
Dang, makes me wish I hadn't traded my Kohn collector card for all those Hawking and Einstein cards with the action photos. :-(
And I just got another Sir I. Newton card. Drat!
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.
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.
I'm sure it would be neat to go through and read a lot of these papers, but it's going to be very hard and very slow and you are going to have to have tons of background material at your side just to get the most basic meaning from them. I can't imagine reading papers in my field and getting much meaning from them before I went to college.
IMHO, if your goal is learning, you'd be much better off with some good textbooks. I know a textbook isn't as glamorous as reading the most cited papers in physics, but you'll make way more progress towards learning your area. There are some really good textbooks out there in most fields. And after getting through a few good textbooks you'll be able get through a whole lot more of the glamorous papers.
If you don't know where to start, just find your favorite university's web site and skim syllabi for the classes that interest you. Even better would be to peruse through MIT's Open Courseware, or even registering for classes at a local CC. All of course, if you aren't already headed to an undregraduate degree...
Come on. Who hasn't heard of Koooooohhnnnnnn!
The only conclusion that can be drawn from this "study" is that counting citations is a terrible measure of the relative merits of a paper. It may be OK for comparing average to good papers but obviously fails for evaluating the absolute best discoveries. One simple reason is that because more papers are published today you will get more citations of recent articles - esp since the older ones are established as "fact" and often not cited. If he had done something like normalized for the number of papers being published at the time weighted for how often the offspring were cited, it might have worked a bit better
This type of analysis, while useful for bureaucrats who need simple, if inaccurate metrics, is still dubious. The most cited papers often turn out to be methods papers e.g. how to run gels rather than those with the most import.
They left out review papers - RMP is all review papers, as are occasional papers in the other journlas. Review papers have very distinct citation histories that would completely mess up this sort of analysis (and yes, they are generally much more highly cited than regular papers).
Energy: time to change the picture.
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.
And sitting in Newton's chair no less. Go figure.
Newton had an electric wheelchair with a speech synthesiser? Man, that guy was way ahead of his time.
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