The researchers advance while standing on the shoulders of the giants, to paraphrase Isaac Newton. So what research giants are still mentioned frequently today?
One way of responding which is to determine which articles most often appear in the reference lists of today’s research articles. Nature Asked three bibliometricians who study reference models in scientific publications to dig in data. They caused tens of millions of references cited in all the articles published in 2023, the most complete year available in research standards at the time.
Researchers have found that popular articles of the 21st century on subjects such as artificial intelligence (AI), scientific software and methods to improve the quality of research dominate today’s reference lists. But some studies published before 2000 are still strongly recognized now (see “What articles are the most referenced?”).
The study of the references cited in a large collection of articles provides a base to find the intellectual roots of an area, explains Robin Haunschild, a Scientometrician at the Max Planck Institute for Solid Statearch in Stuttgart, in Germany.
“This reveals the really important articles for a community,” adds Lutz Bornmann, science sociologist at Max Planck Society in Munich, Germany. Bornmann and Haunschild, with Andreas Thor, a computer scientist from the University of Applied Sciences of Leipzig, Germany, carried out technically difficult for Nature. They relied on a modified version of the software that Bornmann and Thor, with others, introduced in 2016 to help researchers explore the references mentioned1.
To compile a list of the most cited references in publications today, Nature took the median ranking in three databases (see the methodology of scientific sciences2 And Additional information).
IA influencers
The analysis reveals that work on AI published in the last decade has been the most referenced. Nature found a similar model in a related exploration of The most cited articles published in the 21st century.
The most cited articles of the 21st century
But some older AI studies were still quotation magnets in 2023. An article3 Published in 1997 – which describes an architecture of early neural networks for the modeling of languages called short -term memory (LSTM) – was the tenth most cited in 2023. Due to their effectiveness, LSTM remains popular for the processing of certain data. Jürgen Schmidhuber, Pioneer of the AI and one of the authors of the 1997 article, which is now at the University of Science and Technology of King Abdullah, Thuwal, in Saudi Arabia, says that all the old articles of AI are not recognized, in part because these articles have proposed ideas before they are achievable.
“Unfortunately, the field of AI and automatic learning is in prishame,” he says, “and some of the most famous articles have failed to cite the original work published when the calculation was millions of times more expensive than today.”
High materials
Remarkably, another research document4 Nearly three decades ago was the fourth work most referenced in articles published in 2023. In 1996, three researchers from the University of Tulane in New Orleans, Louisiana, published an intelligent and rapid approximation which could be used in software to help researchers calculate electrons interactions in materials, as a means of understanding the properties of materials.
“The quotes have grown up and grew up and grew up,” said physicist Kieron Burke, who co-wrote the article with physicists John Perdew and Matthias Ernzerhof. In fact, a quarter of the total quotes from the newspaper has been collected in the past two years, according to the Dimensions Research Database, and it is also the most cited fourth article of all time (see “These are the most cited research articles of all time”).