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The Most Highly Cited Scientific Papers of All Time
bmahersciwriter writes Citation is the common way that scientists nod to the important and foundational work that preceded their own and the number of times a particular paper is cited is often used as a rough measure of its impact. So what are the most highly cited papers in the past century plus of scientific research? Is it the determination of DNA's structure? The identification of rapid expansion in the Universe? No. The top 100 most cited papers are actually a motley crew of methods, data resources and software tools that through usability, practicality and a little bit of luck have propelled them to the top of an enormous corpus of scientific literature.
The biologist journal editor Ann Körner distilled her experience into the handbook Guide to Publishing a Scientific Paper , which I read a few months back. To warn against overciting, she notes how many young researchers today are likely to cite the original 1950s Crick and Watson paper, even though DNA is familair enough to treat as a given. Is it? I would have assumed journals would let you err on the side of caution and simply remove your citation if it were unnecessary, but apparently citing too much can block approval.
This is what Newton meant when he talked about standing on the shoulders of giants. These methods, algorithms, computer programmes, techniques etc. enable all the research you hear of. The structure of DNA would never have been solved without all the preceding work on x-ray crystallography, for instance. This is truly a case of credit where credit's due and not something surprising...
Alan Turing's most widely cited paper is in biology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chemical_Basis_of_Morphogenesis
1) PDF version http://devbio.wustl.edu/InfoSo...
2) Commentary, 2004: http://www.jbc.org/content/280...
3) Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
"The Lowry protein assay is a biochemical assay for determining the total level of protein in a solution. The total protein concentration is exhibited by a color change of the sample solution in proportion to protein concentration, which can then be measured using colorimetric techniques. It is named for the biochemist Oliver H. Lowry who developed the reagent in the 1940s. His 1951 paper describing the technique is the most-highly cited paper ever in the scientific literature, cited over 200,000 times."
The method combines the reactions of copper ions with the peptide bonds under alkaline conditions (the Biuret test) with the oxidation of aromatic protein residues. The Lowry method is best used with protein concentrations of 0.01–1.0 mg/mL and is based on the reaction of Cu+, produced by the oxidation of peptide bonds, with Folin–Ciocalteu reagent (a mixture of phosphotungstic acid and phosphomolybdic acid in the Folin–Ciocalteu reaction). The reaction mechanism is not well understood, but involves reduction of the Folin–Ciocalteu reagent and oxidation of aromatic residues (mainly tryptophan, also tyrosine). Experiments have shown that cysteine is also reactive to the reagent. Therefore, cysteine residues in protein probably also contribute to the absorbance seen in the Lowry Assay. [3] The concentration of the reduced Folin reagent is measured by absorbance at 750 nm.[4] As a result, the total concentration of protein in the sample can be deduced from the concentration of Trp and Tyr residues that reduce the Folin–Ciocalteu reagent.
The method was first proposed by Lowry in 1951. The Bicinchoninic acid assay and the Hartree–Lowry assay are subsequent modifications of the original Lowry procedure.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
I would have assumed journals would let you err on the side of caution and simply remove your citation if it were unnecessary, but apparently citing too much can block approval.
Nowadays, most journals will expect the author to provide a camera-ready copy. They don't do any editing or typesetting anymore, they just handle peer-review and publication. Authors can modify papers following suggestions from peer review, which may include suggestions on citations. I think Nature and Science still to their own typesetting, and may commission better illustrations, but that's a rare exception. In nearly all cases where the paper has been accepted, the author has the final say about the details (within reason, of course).
Stephan
It is the field of biology that you are talking about? That's certainly not the case for my own field (linguistics). The editor still molds the submissions into a house style before it goes to the printer; the author isn't expected to do all the typesetting himself. Also, since articles are being written in English by non-native speakers, many journals will send articles on to a native English speaker to make them sound more natural (as a grad student I picked up a lot of work this way) before publication.
Citation practice (along with author ordering) is very different among the disciplines. In life sciences, there's a tendency to cite papers with lab techniques, as a shorthand for some complex procedure "The cultures were processed according to Smith[1] followed by the Jones assay[2]".
In engineering, there tends to be less of a tendency to cite a paper with methodological info: Very few people using an FFT cite the Cooley-Tukey paper; likewise, someone talking about using an ADC for sampled data isn't going to cite Nyquist, even if they say "the sampling rate was 5 time the Nyquist frequency". Likewise, in engineering, you don't see: The dice were attached to the substrate using a eutectic mixture of lead and tin as recommended by Agricola in "de re Metallica".
The editor still molds the submissions into a house style before it goes to the printer; the author isn't expected to do all the typesetting himself.
As usual those blasted physicists have it all figured out, especially in HEP. No one is expected to do typesetting: it is a process that computers excel at. Instead you provide the document source in REVTEX4 (a largeish subset of LaTeX). The journal replaces your style file with their own and it's done.
Also, since articles are being written in English by non-native speakers, many journals will send articles on to a native English speaker to make them sound more natural (as a grad student I picked up a lot of work this way) before publication.
Never seen that personally, but I'm not in linguistics. Instead, I've had (clearly non native) reviews complaining incorrectly about English constuctions that I've used, and recommending I get a native English speaker to review it. The nerve of that is quite astonishing and it would be funny if such reviewers didn't generally revel in making the life of authors as miserable as possible.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
It's more common in the sciences, where the convention is to provide a LaTeX stylesheet. In subjects where manuscripts are submitted in Word format, the typesetting by the authors tends to be so bad that you need to have a professional redo it.
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It looks like the majority of the top 20 most cited papers cover new methods or tools (e.g., a new lab technique or a new software program), not new fundamental scientific discoveries (e.g., the structure of DNA or expansion of the universe). I guess this isn't really surprising, but it is interesting. One could conclude that scientists who want to make a major impact on their field should spend their time inventing new methods for doing fundamental research and let other scientists actually do the research.
It is the field of biology that you are talking about? That's certainly not the case for my own field (linguistics). The editor still molds the submissions into a house style before it goes to the printer; the author isn't expected to do all the typesetting himself.
Ok, my experience is mostly with computer science, math and physics. Typically, you write your paper in LaTeX with a style provided by the publisher. LaTeX does the actual typesetting, of course. Some journals also have Word templates, but that's much rarer.
Stephan
Its a good example. Crick and Watsons work neither discovered DNA not did it explain how the information is stored. What is actually in the paper is a model for the helix structure, which is totally irrelevant in the majority of cases that you talk about DNA.
After getting the final submission rejected 6 times. (The first failure was because it was PDF4, and they wanted PDF5 ... as if the couldn't up convert ... so I tried giving them the original source for them to use, but giving them ODF and DOC files resulted in font screwups ... so I tried generating the PDF through other mechanisms ... but they complained I had bookmarks (none of which showed up in Abobe Acrobat Professional) ... then their website said I had sent them too many PDFs (3), so I had to use their other methods ...
After spending hours on trying to get their damned website to accept my paper, I then got told by my boss that IEEE *also* makes you sign over copyright of your paper to them ... why, because you use their damned MS Word template that they can't even generate a clean paper from?
So I said fuck it, and withdrew the paper, and withdrew from the workshop (which is today) entirely. Never again will I even consider submitting a paper to IEEE.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I've had (clearly non native) reviews complaining incorrectly about English constuctions that I've used, and recommending I get a native English speaker to review it. The nerve of that is quite astonishing and it would be funny if such reviewers didn't generally revel in making the life of authors as miserable as possible.
You know I have lots of friends who work with native speakers to make their texts easier to read, strange constructs is just one thing they remoev.
Typesetting isn't a process computers excel at. LaTeX is good, but not nearly as good as a good designer equipped with InDesign and loads and loads of time. It's faster and cheaper, yes, and certainly good enough for most academic journals (probably not Nature). Unfortunately, it also offers nothing (except decent typesetting) for fields that don't deal much with maths, whereas Microsoft Word offers a few nice tools, is somewhat easy to use, and has rubbish typesetting.
So some of the most widely used scientific discoveries never get cited.
That explains why my work did not make it to the top of this flawed metric.
Here is another link that is more readable. In a more easily readable form Candlestickmaker, S., and Helpit, Canna E. 1955, Compositio Math., 237, 476.
Giftcourt. M. F. 1956, J. Symbolic Logic, 237, 476.
Nostradamus, M. 1955, Centuries (Lyons).
Pythagoras — 520, in: Euclid — 300, Elements, Book I, Prop. 47 (Athens).
Shopwalker, M., and Salesperson, F. 1955, Heredity, 237, 476.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
You know I have lots of friends who work with native speakers to make their texts easier to read, strange constructs is just one thing they remoev.
I'm a native speaker and I have no objection to removing strange constructs. However, the construct was not strange. It was co-authored with another native speaker and a fluent non native speaker. Neither of them could figure out what this guy thought was wrong with the construct.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Typesetting isn't a process computers excel at. LaTeX is good, but not nearly as good as a good designer equipped with InDesign and loads and loads of time.
Not sure I agree. For something that isn't in TeX's general area then yes. However, a good designer with TeX and loads of time can do a very very good job. TeX does an excellent job of the basics like kerning (especially the modern variants which do micro kerning and stuff), spacing, breaking and so on. It also does a much, much better job than most people can do and certainly given a time budget it does a much better job than almost all people.
It's faster and cheaper, yes, and certainly good enough for most academic journals (probably not Nature).
I believe you are actually mistaken about that. I think they actually do use it internally.
Unfortunately, it also offers nothing (except decent typesetting) for fields that don't deal much with maths, whereas Microsoft Word offers a few nice tools, is somewhat easy to use, and has rubbish typesetting.
Well, it offers automatic cross referencing, with almost every conceivable variant of bibliographic styles. It also does that in a reliable and bug free manner, not something I've observed with word. Biologists spend an inordinate amount of time battling with reference managers.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Always bad to reply to onesself, but [citation needed blah blah]
Here's a nice article on the problems of peer review (starting on page 2), iuncluding the problem of non native speakers trying to correct native ones:
http://www.bmva.org/_media/bmv...
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Pythagoras — 520, in: Euclid — 300, Elements, Book I, Prop. 47 (Athens).
The citation is probably wrong. Although we don't know exactly where Euclid's Elements were written, he lived in Alexandria and not in Athens. The oldest known complete edition was also edited in Alexandria.
Yes, I'm a citation nazi.
You use Google for research? Seriously?
How is that worse than using endnote?
And yes, I do. They have this quite useful tool called google scholar. For many papers you can easily follow chains of references, reading the papers citing the ones of interest, and easily looking up the ones cited. They also often have links to open PDFs so you don't have to bugger around trying to find how to get access to some journal or other which won't authenticate properly.
But yes, these days google features prominantly in any literature searches I do. I can easily find the websites of the relevant academics. I can find papers, citing papers, cited papers and all sorts of useful things. Seriously, who doesn't use google for that sort of thing?
SJW n. One who posts facts.