I read the top 100 scientific papers of all time

What is the greatest science of all time? Well by one measure, the most cited papers of all time, ie those papers that have been referenced the most times in other scientific papers. So, as a challenge I tried to read the top 100 most cited papers of all time. This went about as well as you could hope for actually, while some papers in physical chemistry and statistics were beyond me (what EVEN IS density functional theory??) the majority were surprisingly readable. I learned some fascinating things about bioinformatics, graphene, and the many, many ways you can measure proteins, as well as some insights into how science as a whole is done.

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Edited by Luke Negus.

This video is about the scientific method. What is a scientific paper? What is a citation? What are the top scientific papers of all time or the most cited papers of all time? What is density functional theory???? All this and more in this video essay slash vlog.

Huge thanks to my supporters on Patreon: Marcus Bosshard, Edwin, Andrew Knop, Shab Kumar, Cameron Grey, Brady Johnston, Liat Khitman, Jesper Norsted, Kent & Krista Halloran, Rapssack, Kevin O'Connor, Timo Kerremans, Thines Ganeshamoorthy, Sam Harvey, Ashley Wilkins, Michael Parmenter, Samuel Baumgartner, Dan Sherman, ST0RMW1NG 1, Adrian Sand, Morten Engsvang, Josh Schiager, Farsight101, K.L, poundedjam, Daan Sneep, Felix Freiberger, Chris Field, Robert Connell, Jaime Stark, Kolbrandr, , Sebastain Graf, Dan Nelson, Shane O'Brien, Alex, Fujia Li, Harry Eakins, Will Tolley, Cody VanZandt, Jesper Koed, Jonathan Craske, Albrecht Striffler, Igor Francetic, Jack Troup, SexyCaveman , James Munro, Sean Richards, Kedar , Omar Miranda, Alastair Fortune, bitreign33 , Mat Allen, Anne Smith, Rafaela Corrêa Pereira, Colin J. Brown, Princess Andromeda, Leighton Mackenzie, BenDent, Thusto , Andy Hartley, Lachlan Woods, Dan Hanvey, Simon Donkers, James Bridges, Liam , Andrea De Mezzo, Wendover Productions, Kendra Johnson.

[wiesorix]

I love the conclusion of this video. In popular media there is often an obsession with "great minds" and "geniuses" and "breakthroughs", but as you point out science is actually a process of many small contributions and little steps forward (and backward). Very well said!

[ultx]

As a PhD candidate in physics, I can tell you that after reading hundreds of papers, we all learn one very important thing -- none of us know how to write well :)))

[pjx]

The et al family sure does produce a lot of stellar researchers! excited to see what they do in the future.

[theoreticallyspeaking]

I actually work on developing "potential functions" for water. The reason that paper gets cited so much is because of the popularity of both monte carlo and molecular dynamics simulations. Water is a very difficult substance to model accurately (believe it or not!) so a lot of work is done just researching water and hence cites this paper for historical reference of early models of water.

Additionally, biologists do lots of molecular dynamics simulations in which they need a solvent to surround their proteins, etc. Because these models are very simple, they are fast to evaluate computationally and hence get used when all you want is an environment for a protein and not a cutting edge water model.

In short, the paper is basically a very successful review article.

[juliankandlhofer]

"The first law of papers states that science is a process. Do not look at where we are now, but look at where we will be two more papers down the line."
- Two Minute Papers, in basically every video :)
Great video!

[dstarley]

Great video. I'm assuming the reason the water simulation paper is so high is probably because it sets the precedent for the process of computer modelling molecule interactions through e.g Monte Carlo simulations. This is a technique used by pretty much all chemical simulations - I used it in my research project on Metal Organic Frameworks.

[talitek]

"Earth Scientists don't like writing papers"
As an earth scientist, very true. I'd rather go hit a rock with a hammer. But in all seriousness, I suspect the lack of earth science on the list comes from it being such a new and fast changing field. By the time any one paper gets cited ~500 times another paper describing a better method has been written!

[DrTrefor]

Completely ignoring the content of the video (which is really amazing) but I'm loving your editing. Graphics are super engaging, matching the pacing so nicely. I literally have been taking notes of cool ways you keep everything fresh with different animations etc:D Ultimately the content matters more than the editing, but I think this is a great example of how editing can make the content just that little bit more engaging.

[spambaconeggspamspam]

As a molecular biologist this is quite fun. I expect the founding paper on CRISPR-Cas9 to become part of this list as well.

[jazzygm]

One other method I've heard of to rank papers is not by their citations, but by the number of citations their citations had, so 'child' citations as it were. This could drastically change the list, removing many of the 'method' papers and potentially including papers which spawned entire branches of scientific enquiry.

[RealRedHerring]

Interestingly with some of these big discoveries like DNA's structure, I think a lot of these concepts almost become like "public domain" science, so to speak. People learn these things as a part of their formal didactic learning, and it seems superfluous in the modern day to dig out and cite these papers.

[MedlifeCrisis]

As soon as you said biology I just knew Alex was inevitable

[TheJennifer]

I expect the list is definitely missing some of the big Machine Learning papers: Hochreiter and Schmidhuber (1997) which introduced LSTMs is at 60k+ citations, Vaswani et al (2017) introducing transformers is at 35k+, Bahdanau et al (2014) introducing attention is at 20k+ and Krizhevsky et al (2012) which introduced CNNs for image recognition is over 100k now

[MichaelOrtega]

Your channel is a treasure chest that should be protected at all cost!

[idraote]

There's also the problem of "fake citations" which are not, as one would expect, works cited but not actually read.
Fake citations are citations that the author was blackmailed into doing if they wanted to see their own paper published.
This apparently happens a lot, especially in universities, and goes hand in hand with professors with tenure blackmailing PHD candidates and junior researchers into quoting them as co-authors of a research they didn't take part in.

[abass]

I remember how excited I was when a paper of mine went over 100 citations for the first time these numbers are insane!

[pseudophd]

Did not know about the Higgs Boson paper, interesting. The Jorgensen et al paper (which i've cited in my thesis and MD papers) is so high because anyone who has ever performed solution based molecular dynamics simulations (e.g. protein MD) will have cited it with respect to the rationalising the water model they used.

[rhiannon]

Can you find the top 100 for humanities subjects? I think it would be really interesting to see how they breakdown between subjects, even if you didn't read them all

[NinjaElephant]

I love the idea that becoming a great researcher does not mean to find something great yourself but to discover something that helps others finding things.

[TimeofMinecraftMods]

You should try to use page-rank to find the most impactful papers:
Many big discoveries are big because they launch their own sub-field (i.e. Einstein's theory of relativity). This induces a "cambrian explosion" in that field, which often leads to many papers being published and superseding each other.
In total, the number of citations for the original paper will be low, because it was replaced with an updated version which is now cited by everybody, but in terms of total impact these are way more crucial to science.
Page rank is a way of modelling these transitive citations on a large scale (you could also compute the transitive hull of citations, but I have a feeling that this is going to blow-up computationally)