The Most Highly Cited Paper in Publishing History

http://www.jbc.org/content/280/28/e25.full

by davi • 15 years ago

52 10 15 years ago

Misleading headline (exposing a science bias). The article states "This paper, which is featured here as a JBC Classic, is the most highly cited paper in science." I don't happen to know if it is still the most cited paper ever, but this article can't actually make that claim without doing the bibliometrics for all of academia.

pama2• 15 years ago

Both the title of the article (headline) and the statement you highlighted, are valid guesses. The number of citations of that paper was 275,669 as of January 2004; quite possibly over 300K by now. For comparison, the most cited article in CS, Rubin's paper on EM, has about 12K citations in ISI. What additional fields of academia (outside of science) did you have in mind?

hugh33• 15 years ago

I'd be incredibly surprised if it weren't. The (slow) rate at which papers are produced in the humanities, and the (small) number of citations on each, means you're awfully unlikely to find one with 300,000 citations.

kanzure• 15 years ago

The original BLAST paper has >34,000 incoming links or references, according to Google Scholar.

http://www2.cs.fit.edu/~dmitra/Compbio/Resources/altschuleta...

Edit: see replies, etc.

pama2• 15 years ago

The number of citations of this JBC article is closer to 300K, so it has a safe order of magnitude more citations than the BLAST paper.

scott_s• 15 years ago

The author of the paper, Lowry, is also funny enough to literally make me laugh out loud. I'd point them out, but why spoil them? Read the article.

hugh33• 15 years ago

The most cited paper in physics (and/or chemistry) is, last I heard, by Walter Kohn. In fact, if I recall correctly he wrote the top two: Hohenberg & Kohn and Kohn & Sham.

I hear that one of his favourite observations, though, is that you're not really famous until they stop citing you. I mean, who cites Newton?

Dabacon• 15 years ago

Those are the most cited from the Physical Review journals: http://bit.ly/jMN0SP

Interesting because they have such high citation counts in part because they hit a nice spot relevant to both physics and chemistry.

hugh33• 15 years ago

Yeah, the top four are the four key papers of Density Functional Theory. After that it gets a little more diverse.

I've met a couple of the people on that list. One of 'em is a nice guy. Another is a complete jerk. And that's all I'll say in my state of only partial anonymity.

enjo• 15 years ago

My wife has tentatively agreed to cite this paper in all future accounting papers she writes... that may be the wine talking tho.

The Most Highly Cited Paper in Publishing History

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