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."

Comments

It's just phys rev

[dbitch]

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.

Re:It's just phys rev

[rsidd]

Not only that, but before World War II, the "centre of gravity" for science was really Europe, not America, so hardly any of the major papers in quantum mechanics and so on got published in the Physical Review journals. So this survey is highly biased to the years after 1945. That's why condensed matter physics does so well: its golden age was the 1950s and the 1960s, when basic quantum mechanics was well understood and techniques from quantum field theory were being applied to solid state systems for the first time.

Scientific collaboration networks

[mattjb0010]

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.

Quick and quiet death?

[rde]

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?

Sturgeon's law

[philbert26]

It's tempting to wonder if Redner's paper conclusively proves Sturgeon's Law."

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?

Re:Sturgeon's law

[Chess_the_cat]

But if 90% of everything is crap then aren't 90 of these top 100 papers crap as well?

Counting Citations

[lucabrasi999]

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.

Re:Counting Citations

[rangek]

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.

Neither. Lot's of people have been using Walter Kohn's theory. The reason why he is at the top of the list is because of the sucess of density functional theory (DFT) first in condensed matter physics and then in chemistry. A goodly portion of the unclassified CPU power used my scientists around the world is probably dedicated to examining systems with DFT.

Essentially, there are two neat things about DFT. The first is that it proves that it is possible to fully describe the state of a bunch of electrons with the 4 dimensional spin density, rather than the normal 4N coordinates (where N is the number of electrons, 3 cartestians an a spin per electron). This, combined with Kohn-Sham theory results in a method of calculating electronic structure that formally scales and N^4, but gives answers often as accurate as N^5 and higher methods. Hence, Nobel Prize :)

Re:Counting Citations

[lucabrasi999]

Note: I wasn't questioning Walter Kohn. I was questioning the theory behind the original article. How does counting citations become classified as "research".

Re:Counting Citations

[rangek]

How does counting citations become classified as "research".

Well, sure, it is not going to win this guy a Nobel prize, but it is interesting. Maybe not "research" by many definitions of the word, but definitely interesting.

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. But that is the neat thing. This paper shows how much physics and chemistry interact. Many of the other paper in this top 100 list are probably more cited in the chemistry literature than in physics (e.g. Carr-Parinello)

Re:Counting Citations

[AEton]

Does this type of research really tell us anything?

Sort of. What it tells us is how necessary it is for researchers to cite certain papers for the points they're studying to be understood.

What this research obliquely demonstrates is the obliteration phenomenon - that certain works in physics (though we can only speculate which) are so well-known that it's unnecessary to cite them.

Eugene Garfield's paper on the subject, where he coined the term, is available here (because of the nature of the PDF, Google can't OCR it - sorry).

Re:Counting Citations

[sphealey]

Neither. Lot's of people have been using Walter Kohn's theory. The reason why he is at the top of the list is because of the sucess of density functional theory (DFT) first in condensed matter physics and then in chemistry.

The problem here is that if a concept is a "safety pin" - which is to say, after it has been described for the first time it is blindingly obvious to everyone in the field - then it may never be cited regardless of how seminal it actually was. No one cites Newton/Leibnitz every time they differentiate an equation in a physics paper, to take an extreme example.

sPh

Higgs? EW?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm surprised to not see more papers on electroweak/higgs theory. higgs, salam and weinberg aren't there, from the quick glance. glashow and maiani comes up at #73.

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

Re:Higgs? EW?

[Bootsy Collins]

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)

You're correct that Feynman was a more dynamic speaker/teacher, etc. But I think it's a bit of a jump to say that that's the only reason why he gets more attention than Schwinger and Tomonaga. For starters, they didn't all do the same work, even on QED. It's true that all three arrived at equivalent formalisms for calculating amplitudes, but that's not the same as saying they did the same work. Have you thrown away Feynman diagrams and straightforward perturbation expansions and instead tried to do things the way Schwinger did? It's a bitch! As a famous quote of the time went, "Feynman shows you how to do it; Schwinger shows you that only he can do it." And that had a lot to do with the eventual predominance of Feynman's perspective, and thus his getting more recognition than Schwinger or Tomonaga.

Furthermore, while I can't speak to Tomonaga in this regard, Feynman made a major splash in a much broader spectrum of physical investigations than Schwinger did. The work on QED was simply one of many arguably Nobel-worthy accomplishments of his. That, too, contributes to his being paid more attention to than Schwinger and Tomonaga.

Of course, you could argue that these are only things that matter to the cognoscenti; they don't explain why Feynman is more recognized by the general public. But I would claim that contrary to what physicists, and geeks who like physics, think, the general public is pretty oblivious to physicists entirely. They've heard of Einstein; they might have heard of Hawking. That's pretty much it, though. We think of Feynman as famous; the average person on the street has never heard of him.

So while I would agree that Feynman's dynamic personality, excellence in presentation, etc., is important in the way he is remembered by those who are aware of him at all, at least equally important is the fact that he did a ton of amazing new physics.

Witten

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

CS Rankings

[ravydavygravy]

Here's something kinda similar for CS papers, curtosy of the excellent citeseer:

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/articles.html

Dave

Re:This is absolutely wonderful!

[lucabrasi999]

Mind you many of these will be for graduate-level people but I'm sure many can be read by the layman

Ah, No.

Re:This is absolutely wonderful!

[kmac06]

I agree with the grandparent to this post. I'm halfway through an undergrad degree in Physics, and I can barely understand the topic of physics papers when I read them. IE, abstract for the #1 paper is:

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..