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Classic Papers: Articles That Have Stood the Test of Time

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Re: Classic Papers: Articles That Have Stood the Test of Time

#32

As one might guess, there is a lot wrong with this list even within there stated goals. My examples are drawn from mathematics, since that's what I know. They appear to use the journal to classify category, which doesn't work very well since many of the best results are published in general journals. Additionally, since citation counts vary so widely between sub-fields, there is a strong pull towards selecting miscla…

Cognitive Science suffers from the same problem of misclassifications from higher-citation fields (neuroscience).

Agreed that projects don't have to be perfect but it does have to have some functionality to ship... I don't see how I could use this could help me construct a course reading list or to improve my understanding of my academic field, given the problems.

Re: Classic Papers: Articles That Have Stood the Test of Time

#33
post #32

As one might guess, there is a lot wrong with this list even within there stated goals. My examples are drawn from mathematics, since that's what I know. They appear to use the journal to classify category, which doesn't work very well since many of the best results are published in general journals. Additionally, since citation counts vary so widely between sub-fields, there is a strong pull towards selecting miscla…

Cognitive Science suffers from the same problem of misclassifications from higher-citation fields (neuroscience). Agreed that projects don't have to be perfect but it does have to have some functionality to ship... I don't see how I could use this could help me construct a course reading list or to improve my understanding of my academic field, given the problems.

There wasn't even a neuroscience category on the page, only neurology and neurosurgery.

Re: Classic Papers: Articles That Have Stood the Test of Time

#35
post #23

They completely missed, with 1800+ citations, the winner of the “Theory of Cryptography Conference (TCC) 2016 Test of Time award ”: “Calibrating Noise to Sensitivity in Private Data Analysis” by Cynthia Dwork, Frank McSherry, Kobbi Nissim, and Adam Smith. Oh, it also just won the 2017 Gödel Prize; it really ought to be at the top of both the “Theoretical Computer Science” and “Computer Security and Cryptography” list…

From the article: "This release of classic papers consists of articles that were published in 2006..". Your second one could be there (I haven't looked for it), but you're mentioning some problems with the article, maybe it's that..

Re: Classic Papers: Articles That Have Stood the Test of Time

#36

As one might guess, there is a lot wrong with this list even within there stated goals. My examples are drawn from mathematics, since that's what I know. They appear to use the journal to classify category, which doesn't work very well since many of the best results are published in general journals. Additionally, since citation counts vary so widely between sub-fields, there is a strong pull towards selecting miscla…

Also, were you able to find any papers in number theory? That's a huge gap as it is one of mathematics's primary subfields. Analysis seems to represented, as well as topology (via "geometry").

Re: Classic Papers: Articles That Have Stood the Test of Time

#37

Out of curiosity, does anyone have any examples of scientific books (or papers) that are the exact opposite: influential or famous at the time but completely and utterly destroyed by the test of time. Like, that seem silly to us in how completely and utterly wrong they turned out to be in their every single conclusion. I'm thinking about research versions of Lord Kevin's favorite edict: "Heavier than air flying machi…

Sure fields of research go obsolete all the time. E.g. much of the computer vision stuff from 2006 is basically dead now. If you go further back, a lot of early AI research was exciting at the time, but is entirely forgotten about now.

There's some difference between obsolete--a method that gets replaced by an improved method later on--and just plain wrong.

Re: Classic Papers: Articles That Have Stood the Test of Time

#39

A lot has happened in my profession since 2006...

But it wouldn't necessarily be a 'classic'.

The point of the exercise is to find papers that are widely considered valuable, especially to other researchers. To do this, they're using citation counts.

There's obviously a number of problems with citations, including self-cites, negative citations ("Alice & Bob '06 shook the community when they found things, but our better, larger study finds no evidence of any effect"), and such. But it makes sense for a company built upon citation rank indexing to rely on such methods =)

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