Slashdot Mirror
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."
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 |
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.
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
Ah, No.
"...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....
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."
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.
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.
From a theory of Hohenberg and Kohn, approximation methods for treating an inhomogeneous system of interacting electrons are developed. These methods are exact for systems of slowly varying or high density. For the ground state, they lead to self-consistent equations analogous to the Hartree and Hartree-Fock equations, respectively. In these equations the exchange and correlation portions of the chemical potential of a uniform electron gas appear as additional effective potentials. (The exchange portion of our effective potential differs from that due to Slater by a factor of 23.) Electronic systems at finite temperatures and in magnetic fields are also treated by similar methods. An appendix deals with a further correction for systems with short-wavelength density oscillations.
I kinda sorta knew what they were talking about up until Hartree and Hartree-Fock. After that I have no idea. For most of these papers, you really do need some graduate level education to know what's going on..