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The most-cited papers

nature.com

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Re: The most-cited papers

#11

Post by pelario »

z3t4 wrote: post #9

What I find interesting is that many papers use references from the 70's and some times even 100 years old, in where they used very crude tools to come to certain conclusions. I'm not saying we should discard old science discoveries, but it would be interesting redoing the experiments with today's technology.

I think that one usually cites the paper were the idea was first proposed, and also some of the latest advances in the trend (including, as your example, papers where the experiment is redo with newest technology).

The thing is that "the latest paper" on the topic is very likely to change over time, but the first paper that proposed the idea is likely to remain the same.

Re: The most-cited papers

#12

Post by pcrh »

z3t4 wrote: post #9

What I find interesting is that many papers use references from the 70's and some times even 100 years old, in where they used very crude tools to come to certain conclusions. I'm not saying we should discard old science discoveries, but it would be interesting redoing the experiments with today's technology.

Nobody discards "old" science discoveries, any more than they discard the "old" inventions of steel, or indeed the wheel, they build upon them.

Re-visiting previous studies with newer approaches is a common theme in archaeology, where sites or artifacts are sometimes incompletely investigated on purpose, with the view to leaving undisturbed material that can be investigated in the future using technology not yet conceived of.

Re: The most-cited papers

#13

Post by noname123 »

tedks wrote: post #8
noname123 wrote: post #5

Flipped through to find whether genomics/bioinformatics would be well represented; there were at least 2 papers on BLAST in the top 15, and 4th paper is the Sanger method. But where is Watson & Crick? My guess is that all of the subsequent papers that uses BLAST as a tool have to cite it; similarly all sequencing papers cite Sanger as a tool which is why its citation rate dropped when next-gen sequencing method repla…

>which goes to show citation is not an accurate measure of scientific impact because it is equivalent of citing "Git/compiler/IDE" for a software project. The key difference is that BLAST is not a commodity, or at least was not at the time of its release. If there was only one compiler, or one best compiler, we would cite this in CS papers. In fact, "David A. Wheeler's sloccount" is commonly cited in CS papers, as we…

Thanks for your detailed response. I see your point. Tangential, I used to use Weka and liked it a lot and good to know that it is still very popular despite all of the Big Data/Data Science touting Hadoop/Apache Spark.

Re: The most-cited papers

#14

Post by adw »

myth_buster wrote: post #4
ebspelman wrote: post #3

Really enjoyed the relationship between this paper's title and the graph of its citation frequency: http://i.imgur.com/RO6BVRx.png

I think it would have been useful to have the graph reflect discipline's color.

The Perdew-Burke-Enzerhof functional, and the generalized gradient approximation, is a Big Honking Deal for accurate quantum-mechanical simulation of solids.

For more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Density_functional_theory

(I used to be a happy customer, back when I was a scientist.)

Re: The most-cited papers

#16

Post by logicallee »

pcrh wrote: post #12
z3t4 wrote: post #9

What I find interesting is that many papers use references from the 70's and some times even 100 years old, in where they used very crude tools to come to certain conclusions. I'm not saying we should discard old science discoveries, but it would be interesting redoing the experiments with today's technology.

Nobody discards "old" science discoveries, any more than they discard the "old" inventions of steel, or indeed the wheel, they build upon them. Re-visiting previous studies with newer approaches is a common theme in archaeology, where sites or artifacts are sometimes incompletely investigated on purpose, with the view to leaving undisturbed material that can be investigated in the future using technology not yet conc…

I hope this doesn't make me sound like a hipster, but I can't remember the last time I saw a wheel.

Re: The most-cited papers

#17

Post by JetSpiegel »

logicallee wrote: post #16
pcrh wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody discards "old" science discoveries, any more than they discard the "old" inventions of steel, or indeed the wheel, they build upon them. Re-visiting previous studies with newer approaches is a common theme in archaeology, where sites or artifacts are sometimes incompletely investigated on purpose, with the view to leaving undisturbed material that can be investigated in the future using technology not yet conc…

I hope this doesn't make me sound like a hipster, but I can't remember the last time I saw a wheel.

How did you scroll this page?

Re: The most-cited papers

#19

Post by rflrob »

logicallee wrote: post #16
pcrh wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody discards "old" science discoveries, any more than they discard the "old" inventions of steel, or indeed the wheel, they build upon them. Re-visiting previous studies with newer approaches is a common theme in archaeology, where sites or artifacts are sometimes incompletely investigated on purpose, with the view to leaving undisturbed material that can be investigated in the future using technology not yet conc…

I hope this doesn't make me sound like a hipster, but I can't remember the last time I saw a wheel.

How did you get to work today? Even if you walked, are there really no vehicles along the road?
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