Ever wondered what the top 10 cited academic articles of all time look like? How about the top 100?
A study (Van Noorden et al.) investigated this very topic using citation data provided by Thomson Reuters. According to their analysis, the top cited paper of all time is an article on protein research written in 1951 and has been cited 305,000 times. The second most cited article also focused on protein research and received about 200,000 citations. To make it into the top 10 cited articles, one needs about 40,000 citations… the top 100, about 12,000.
On the other side of the spectrum, about half of all articles indexed by Thomson Reuters have been cited 1 or 0 times.
Want to increase your citation rates? Deposit your publications into IUPUI Scholarworks, IUPUI’s institutional repository. Articles placed in institutional repositories are more likely to be read as well as cited.