I read the top 100 scientific papers of all time

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Visit brilliant.org/simonclark/ to get started learning STEM for free, and the first 200 people will get 20% off their annual premium subscription. It's a better way to learn than reading all these papers, let me tell you...
Nature article with list: www.nature.com/news/the-top-1...
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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Music by Epidemic Sound: epidemicsound.com
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.

Пікірлер: 990

@wiesorix 2 жыл бұрын

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!

@jameson44k 2 жыл бұрын

"Genius breakthroughs" have their place too, at least in certain fields. While they may receive a disproportionate amount of public attention, they also have great impact and influence on research itself. This is clearly the case for example in theoretical physics and mathematics.

@DarkHarlequin 2 жыл бұрын

THIS! Thank you one of my biggest pet peeves. Holywoods and the general medias obsession and depiction of big breakthroughs as these acts of singular genius by briliant minds who were just enlightened by a stroke of genius in a moment of clarity. I assume people love this for the same reason they love 'briliant' billionairs advancing the world. If it's those genius people who will progress the world with their briliant mind then I (who ofc is not a supergenius) don't actually need to do anything. 'I couldn't anyway that is for geniuses!' So it's quite comforting/avoids feeling any pressure and having to concern yourself with 'boring' ish like 'process' and 'incremental advancements' or what role I could play in making the world better.

@DarkHarlequin 2 жыл бұрын

@@jameson44k 'Genius Breakthroughs' in my experience are scientific advancements over months and years explained through one single moment in that year long process. Like claiming the asassination of duke Ferdinand caused World War 1.

@jameson44k 2 жыл бұрын

@@DarkHarlequin Popular media may depict it that way, I don't really pay attention to them. Mature scientists and mathematicians, on the other hand, tend to care about the steps to breakthroughs and about correct attributions for discoveries.

@SchgurmTewehr 2 жыл бұрын

I agree very much. Indeed.

@ult19x65 2 жыл бұрын

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 :)))

@youisstupid2586 2 жыл бұрын

Define “well”.

@mwanikimwaniki6801 2 жыл бұрын

Lol. Need a hand?

@wadougamer 2 жыл бұрын

bro , phd machine learning here , what is writing ?

@mwanikimwaniki6801 2 жыл бұрын

@@wadougamer 😂😂😂😂🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

@Kaybye555 2 жыл бұрын

Hahahah as a scientific translator (sorry to all scientists y'all are very very smart), but it's true

@pjx9806 2 жыл бұрын

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

@Thats_quite_cool Жыл бұрын

The spread of disciplines they are knowledgeable in is also astounding! From economics to physics to biology they have dabbled in everything!

@redstarchrille Жыл бұрын

@@Thats_quite_cool They even did take credit in my papers :O

@overlordprincekhan 11 ай бұрын

If this is a joke then ok. ET AL means 'and others'

@lordadamson 4 ай бұрын

you just killed the mood @@overlordprincekhan

@anoyint 4 ай бұрын

@@overlordprincekhan such is the nature of a scientist to ruin a joke

@juliankandlhofer7553 2 жыл бұрын

"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!

@chankhavu 2 жыл бұрын

Hold on to your papers!!! What a time to be alive :)

@bagas-12123 2 жыл бұрын

Glad to see a fellow scholar in this comment section

@potatofuryy 2 жыл бұрын

@TLM brah

@olgierdvoneverec4135 2 жыл бұрын

Coincidentally, I think a look at his videos can give a good idea as to why simulated water is so high on citations.

@cea6770 2 жыл бұрын

@@olgierdvoneverec4135 Not exactly. Simulating water in TMP's context is about graphics processing which has more to do with fluid dynamics, whereas the simulation here is actually about the molecular dynamics algorithm, one of the most common few-body chemistry algorithms in existence.

@theoreticallyspeaking2185 2 жыл бұрын

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.

@brokkoliomg6103 2 жыл бұрын

Bro just admit it, Nestle wanted to simulate liquid water so they could sell it at an overpriced rate to profit even more from it, but couldn't handle it even after thousands of studies conducted to achieve this once thought innovative idea of getting water

@Nick-lx4fo 2 жыл бұрын

Chemically, dihydrogen monoxide inhibits significant IMFs (namely hydrogen bonding), so I'd imagine water would be difficult to simulate accurately under non-ideal circumstances

@nikolaimikuszeit3204 2 жыл бұрын

@@brokkoliomg6103 Why would you use valuable water if you can dump cheap sugar-syrup on the customer?

@fraktaalimuoto 2 жыл бұрын

As a turbulence researcher I can really appreciate how insane amount of computation power one can need for truly accurate fluid simulation. Practical simplifications can be really helpful for many uses.

@deberenguer7917 2 жыл бұрын

That’s what I thought too, simulating water using numerical methods is no joke

@dstarley 2 жыл бұрын

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.

@hithuanand4356 2 жыл бұрын

Monte Carlo simulation in electrical engineering too.

@eryana9437 2 жыл бұрын

Yep. I have cited this paper myself. It is the standard water model paper that is commonly cited when using any of the standard water models (SPC, tip3p, tip4p) and since water is the most common solvent in biological and chemical systems.... well. And whenever you tune the interaction parameters of the existing models or develop your own water model, this is the gold standard data set you are comparing against. Also, these water potentials are commonly used in most force field (i.e. interaction model) families. - A phD student in computational chemistry

@lewisvanhugten 2 жыл бұрын

One of my dad's friends who works in programming, spent the better part of 12-ish years creating, optimising and utilising modeling programs that simulate water waves. My super vague memory of his explanation was, because surface waves are effected by the forces of everything around them. Simulating them was extremely difficult thing to achieve with the minimal processing power they had back then

@danielhall3476 2 жыл бұрын

@@eryana9437 could not agree more, as a fellow computational chemist. If you use molecular dynamics simulation for example you may end up citing this paper.

@TobiasStarling 2 жыл бұрын

Yeah I’m in biophysics and we use Monte Carlo simulations for microscopy. Pretty sure it’s big in finance too 😂

@talitek 2 жыл бұрын

"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!

@rounakbiswas2173 2 жыл бұрын

Very true!

@soyokou.2810 2 жыл бұрын

Ooga booga

@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721 2 жыл бұрын

Ordinarily I would expect "I'd rather go hit a rock with a hammer" to be a sarcastic statement, but I suppose you mean that literally.

@jazzygm 2 жыл бұрын

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.

@patriciantre 2 жыл бұрын

It would also be interesting to see some kind of h index of the work (so instead of looking at the h-index of the author over his papers, you would do that over the children of a paper)

@williamedstrom5681 2 жыл бұрын

Yeah, doing a serious analysis of that graph would be awesome. Deepest lengths favored older papers and difficult and complex processes, more branching suggested x, Nobel prize studies stood out for this reason, and overloading the computer and crashing with no results favored earth science

@sigmundfreud2443 Жыл бұрын

The funny part is that scientific fields are so quirky and divided with bad search functions that he wasn't even able to just get all most cited papers by himself. It might be bc auf the monetarisation models of peer-review-magazins or the dividing nature of having so many magazins.

@spambaconeggspamspam 2 жыл бұрын

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

@TheJennifer122 2 жыл бұрын

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

@markthart2661 2 жыл бұрын

Yeah, I was also surprised; Resnet 100k+, dropout 30k+, BERT 30k+

@GalaxyInfernoCodes 2 жыл бұрын

Makes sense, the ML paper "market" has been booming in recent years.

@isaacjackiw9711 2 жыл бұрын

I'd wager that a big part of why ML papers are doing so well is the same as why most of the papers in this list are there: their application to the biomedical field.

@alexander53 2 жыл бұрын

@@isaacjackiw9711 ML is applicable to literally every industry on earth, not just biomedical

@TimeofMinecraftMods 2 жыл бұрын

@@GalaxyInfernoCodes It also has a very similar structure to other experimental sciences, where certain techniques (skip-connections, attention, cnns, GANs, ReLUs, RNNs) are standards. These are the things that usually work (->citation) or, surprisingly, perform badly (->citation). The amount of stuff that generally works is miniscule, so you will see the same papers cited all the time for theoretical analysis, architecture upgrades or applications.

@DrTrefor 2 жыл бұрын

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.

@JamalAhmadMalik 2 жыл бұрын

It was a 15-minute long video, but it felt like even less than 5. 😱

@gbombmr6125 2 жыл бұрын

Reminds me of johny harris

@abu5197 2 жыл бұрын

@@gbombmr6125 He's a legend. Probably the only KZfaqr that can get me to watch 20 min videos in one sitting.

@brenn7754 2 жыл бұрын

Hey its Dr. Trefor Bazett! You're like one of my favorite Mathematics KZfaqrs :)

@thehaptiK 2 жыл бұрын

thanks for your math lessons on youtube.

@RealRedHerring 2 жыл бұрын

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.

@spl2285 2 жыл бұрын

people also stopped citing the papers for the techniques papers for bioscience that are in this video (like sds-page, western blot...) because they also kind of become "public domain" knowledge because it's just so widely-used

@CellRus 2 жыл бұрын

Yes, exactly! Many of these things are public knowledge now, we all know what DNA is (sort of), so when you mention DNA in a paper, you don't have to cite it to prove that DNA is a real thing. So over time, it just becomes accepted. Kinda unfair but at the same time, I would love to discover something that can become public knowledge like that :D

@hesseldekraai 2 жыл бұрын

Yeah some things are just assumed as prior knowledge. I was once looked at funnily for citing a paper from the 1800's

@AbsolXGuardian 2 жыл бұрын

Yeah. If you cited Origin of Species for the concept of Evolution, it would look like your paper had a minimum literature review requirement and you were padding

@zoeshannon9509 2 жыл бұрын

Really good point

@idraote 2 жыл бұрын

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.

@layla-talmedina5733 2 жыл бұрын

Oh wow. I didn’t know that happens-that is, the blackmailing of Ph.D. students by their tenured professors. 😨 Currently in grad school but in the social sciences, though.

@bryanreed742 2 жыл бұрын

@@layla-talmedina5733 these things are rare, but I've heard enough stories that I'm pretty confident that any abusive situation like that that you can think of has probably happened. Thankfully, not most of the time, but universities are very good at keeping their scandals hidden.

@99Cafer99 2 жыл бұрын

It sadly seemst to be pretty common. And in the cases I encountered it not beacuse people are forced to do it, but because some authors, especially in social sciences, seem to have an inner want to splash around with fancy citates, mostly from famous Philosophers. Unfortunately for them I studied Philosophy and read some of the works they cited. They obviously didn't read these works, because the citations were either used in cases were they didn't make any sense at all or were completely misinterpreted to fit the thesis of the author or simplified to an point were they didn't make any sense anymore, which then was pointed out as an flaw; presumably to show what great advances the authors made in their fields. Well, at least the latter was done to Platos "Politeia", who himself with high probability did this trick with the positions of his/Sokrates philosophical "opponents", the Sophists.

@hichaelhighers 2 жыл бұрын

Your first sentence doesn't make any sense.

@chidori0117 2 жыл бұрын

It happens sometimes in smaller field when papers get submitted for review. Since the field is so small it is very likely that the experts selected for review also have relevant papers in the field. Typically the reviewers remain anonymous but you can often tell when one of the reviewers tells you that you also should have cited the 4 papers from that specific author. Not hard to guess in that case who one of the reviewers is :) Most often you just want your paper published and not argue with a reviewer so you just include the citations and be done with it.

@MedlifeCrisis 2 жыл бұрын

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

@realtissaye 2 жыл бұрын

so true

@arthurgrisharivera7885 2 жыл бұрын

oh your here?!

@munawwarshaikh8010 2 жыл бұрын

You should do your own Top 100 bioscience research papers, we'll love it

@neestovekin8251 2 жыл бұрын

@@munawwarshaikh8010 seconded!

@TASHITE 2 жыл бұрын

I guess Alex had 'assay' about biology...hehehe...I'll walk myself out, thanks.

@rhiannon9549 2 жыл бұрын

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

@juliahormayer7255 2 жыл бұрын

Agreed! I don’t even do humanities but I’m so curious !!

@marcus7564 2 жыл бұрын

My guess it will be more big ideas but ones that provide dominant frameworks. Idk what subjects would dominate though. My guess is epistemology?

@Josh-ek8qq 2 жыл бұрын

Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson (about the origins of nationalism) is widely understood to be the most cited humanities journals/books. It is a must read!!

@fragileomniscience7647 2 жыл бұрын

In the discounter store, toilet paper section.

@dylanbyrne8478 2 жыл бұрын

No fuck humanities

@MichaelOrtega 2 жыл бұрын

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

@oskrm 2 жыл бұрын

His channel is like a big density functional theory.

@SchgurmTewehr 2 жыл бұрын

@Elsa ♪ WTF

@CesarAngeles28 2 жыл бұрын

100% agree!!! Love the awareness and the comeback of science as I think it was meant to be in the past. Trying to understand the world as a symbiosis between nature and humanity. All equal all important all to be taken care of.

@cardiyansane1414 2 жыл бұрын

I’ve seen that protected at all costs comment all over the internet

@theWOUNDEDrooster 2 жыл бұрын

the one piece.

@abass1770 2 жыл бұрын

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

@leochinchillaa 2 жыл бұрын

That's nothing. My paper of theoretical quantum calculus in higher dimensions of n has over 10k citations.

@abass1770 2 жыл бұрын

@@leochinchillaa impressive!

@shinmoda 2 жыл бұрын

That's awesome! Great accomplishment :)

@guzma242 2 жыл бұрын

Epic win!! Idk why that other guy was trying to put you down, but that's great!!

@thatoneguy9582 2 жыл бұрын

@@leochinchillaa love reading this then going to op’s channel and seeing “The fortnut experience”

@pseudophd1073 2 жыл бұрын

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.

@NinjaElephant Жыл бұрын

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.

@katemckay9235 2 жыл бұрын

Hey, in Cognitive Science in all studies measuring Reaction Time we essentially have to measure and report the distribution of handedness among our participants. We use "handedness inventories" because it's actually moreso a spectrum than a binary if you dig into that and so we all cite that article! - I've cited it myself.

@petermarksteiner7754 2 жыл бұрын

I enjoy reading very old papers that contain few references or none at all. For example, Riemann's famous paper about the number of primes where he formulates the Riemann hypothesis mentions Euler, Gauss, and Dirichlet in passing but has only one reference: (Jacobi, Fund. S. 184)

@jtktomb8598 2 жыл бұрын

@Miles Doyle no

@fragileomniscience7647 2 жыл бұрын

@TLM Mathematics is real, this crap is not.

@karolakkolo123 2 жыл бұрын

References != citations

@johnie102 2 жыл бұрын

I think mathematics especially has a culture where you only cite something if you use a result from it, while in some other sciences it is much more common to give a brief overview of the field where you give lots of citations.

@zyx6239 2 жыл бұрын

@Miles Doyle why u r gae?

@muhammadabdullahhanif8860 2 жыл бұрын

As a chemist that use Density Functional Theory in my own undergarduate thesis. It is pretty simple actually. But you really need to see a physical system and their model through quantum mechanic POV. I think that particularly hard for you because climate and weather modeling use classical mechanic POV instead quantum mechanic POV.

@majorfallacy5926 2 жыл бұрын

cfd and finite element analysis is already a bottomless well. Going to a quantum mechanics pov sounds scary

@MrNicoJac 2 жыл бұрын

Can you explain the general idea to someone who never made it past highschool level physics? 😅

@AdreaSnow 2 жыл бұрын

@@MrNicoJac imagine throwing electrons at a bunch of nuclei (protons and neutrons) and finding the optimal way in which they’d want to sit. From there, you can figure out the quantum mechanical makeup of the system (which is otherwise very expensive to compute accurately) and determine properties of the chemical system! :)

@AdreaSnow 2 жыл бұрын

The first rule of DFT: if you don’t know what you’re doing, just use B3LYP/6-31+G* as a black box solution The second rule of DFT: when the first rule inevitably breaks down, call a computational chemist ;)

@erikl1478 2 жыл бұрын

@@AdreaSnow this. As an organic chemist - B3LYP is almost all I need for single molecules. Also, I might ask, your use of the term “expensive” refers to “takes long to compute/a lot of computing power”?

@BlackNinjaKicksAss 2 жыл бұрын

As a 2nd year chemistry undergraduate in the UK, I found this video to be very interesting - for me, the single greatest scientific publication of all time would have to be E.J. Corey’s formulation of retrosynthetic analysis, which has enable the synthesis of very complex organic molecules to be broken down into known precursors that can be used as a means to gain access natural products that are otherwise scarce and not bountiful from plant sources.

@footballmint 2 жыл бұрын

Would love to see a philosophy/social sciences version of this, you could definitely learn a lot!

@layla-talmedina5733 2 жыл бұрын

So would I!

@Nick-lx4fo 2 жыл бұрын

Social sciences? Yuck

@ssagere4958 2 жыл бұрын

@@Nick-lx4fo weirdo

@footballmint 2 жыл бұрын

@@Nick-lx4fo We live in a society

@footballmint 2 жыл бұрын

@Rohan saxena I’m not very good at making KZfaq videos, but you’re right, maybe I will when I have the time

@simonfinnie2900 2 жыл бұрын

I think you might be wrong on the machine learning prediction. Since the release of the rankings you used, a few of AI papers have already cracked the top 5, with over 100k citations (and these papers are only 6 years old). Machine learning papers are only getting more dominants in the field. Speaking as a computer science researcher.

@emmazhang2418 2 жыл бұрын

he did say the list was outdated

@simonfinnie2900 2 жыл бұрын

@@emmazhang2418 yeah but the prediction was made as an 'acknowledging change since the list was made' section of the video. So he was accounting for recent changes. He even directly shows one of the machine learning papers I was referencing in the video despite it not being on his list.

@Seamemaria 2 жыл бұрын

Super interesting! I used some of those techniques myself! I never even though about the fact that they could be the most cited papers. This is the type of information I didn't know I wanted to know. Great video as always!

@greeny1033 2 жыл бұрын

I literally had a lecture about the contents of this video this morning! What amazing timing. It was mostly focussing on ecology/conservation scientific papers.

@y-yyy 2 жыл бұрын

The production value of this is crazy. Appreciate your work a lot!

@benfraser9305 2 жыл бұрын

Absolutely love this concept. Would be great to see the top 10 - 100 papers per decade or maybe across a few different disciplines.

@ronnor99 2 жыл бұрын

what i think is a fascinating thing scientific papers is the age range depending on what you're studyin. the the extremes are earth science in which you can use papers that are over 2 hundred years old, and nano technology in which anything before 2015 is considered outdated.

@dhruvpatel4948 2 жыл бұрын

Seems like many of the recent papers from the machine learning/CS field are missing from the list. For example, Alexnet has more than 100k citations in less than one decade. If you list the rate of citations (citations/no. of years since paper published) I assume that list will be dominated by deep learning.

@antaripgiri142 2 жыл бұрын

I think you are right that deep ML/DL would dominate the list when using the the rate of citations y on y. But ranking papers from such a vast umbrella which is science is very difficult. Its like the debate with top 10 sportsperson of all time. It will always come with some sort of unwanted/wanted bias.

@dhruvpatel4948 2 жыл бұрын

@@antaripgiri142 totally agree. Also, as Simon mentioned citation doesn’t necessarily mean impact.

@TheFeldhamster 2 жыл бұрын

Not sure if that's true. There's a lot of papers on SARS CoV2 that got cited several 10K times in the short timeframe from early 2020. 100K citations in a decade is "only" 10K per year.

@Ali-ew9gv 2 жыл бұрын

Something I've not even thought about when citing papers during my degree. Really well put together video, thanks for sharing!

@LiahBrussolo 2 жыл бұрын

Your videos always communicate science in enjoyable and engaging ways, where it's much easier to understand these topics. I'm actually a biology student, so this video was really interesting. I do research in a plant biotechnology lab, and yes, we do use assays 🙂

@grandunification 2 жыл бұрын

I love your conclusion about how science is ultimately a collaborative human endeavor that's done incrementally! I'm doing my PhD in physics education research, and my work isn't intended to cause huge breakthroughs or get tons of citations. It's designed to be a tool for teachers and professors to make the environment of physics better and to make learning it more fulfilling. I love doing research because I don't just have a direct impact on a few classrooms or departments, I have a tangential impact on the thousands of students who learn physics every year. I have so much love and respect for the people who work in the labs every day and publish their increments to move science as a whole forward. It's a shame that instead of celebrating that, physics continues to project the idea of geniuses who change everything overnight.

@InsistentlyInterdisciplinary 2 жыл бұрын

This video is incredibly admirable - not only is it good watching and, of course, good for your channel, but I think these types of videos are really necessary in our age - science is changing (and not always for the better) and being grounded in how and why certain papers make it into history is always a great thing to have at our fingertips.

@Aamirphd 2 жыл бұрын

your videos are such an inspiration for me! As a newish KZfaqr in the similar sector I have learnt so much from you and your content really is incredible! Massive appreciation!

@TimeofMinecraftMods 2 жыл бұрын

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)

@piotrarturklos 2 жыл бұрын

This is an excellent idea.

@Nucleotide5313 2 жыл бұрын

Listening to this video while reading papers in my Lab ☺️Molecular biology is definitely the most exciting field. It’s funny hearing Simon say techniques I’m very familiar with but he isn’t. Definitely tables reversed with the atmospheric physics.

@roosb.967 2 жыл бұрын

Hahahaha I came here to comment this, how the tables have turned 😂🙌🏼

@incianali 2 жыл бұрын

This was an incredible video Simon!! Thanks for taking the time to make it! :)

@yijuntey 2 жыл бұрын

Such a cool concept of a video, liked and subscribed.

@jasonhlozek8961 2 жыл бұрын

For the water paper, water in molecular dynamics (MD) simulations can have important interactions with your protein/carbohydrate/compound of interest. The water molecules are treated classically as a predefined number of point charges (the number in the name for the TIP models) as treating it with QM is too costly. A water model with fewer simulated points is exponentially faster but potentially less accurate. Every MD paper's methods will cite the water model used and, as mentioned in some comments below, this is the initial gold standard paper comparing different water models indicating they don't vary THAT much (depending on context ofcourse).

@Wltrwllyngaeiou 2 жыл бұрын

As a materials scientist, I would probably say that the graphene and nanotube papers are mostly about the methods, rather than some fundamental discovery. At least in the same sense as the bio papers. Just because something is a method doesn't mean it wasn't a revolutionary finding in it's own right.

@dan2124 2 жыл бұрын

Woo! A fellow Materials scientist :3

@youranforit 2 жыл бұрын

i didnt expect this video to make me cry. i feel like ive just seen science in a new light. the quote by newton still has me tearing up as i type this. humans are a collaborative animal and it is so beautiful to view science as a human endeavor, built up in little steps. thank you for this video

@gattillynx 2 жыл бұрын

This was a fascinating video, and the conclusion really drove it home.

@DanielSuguwa 2 жыл бұрын

This is an interesting finding, Simon. Thank you for services in the realm of science community! 😄

@lacdirk 2 жыл бұрын

I think your discovery is spot on: science does not progress by the work of genius, but by the solid and honest work of those who have dedication, if not necessarily talent. We celebrate the seminal points and the singular achievements because humans are biased that way. It contributes to the general misunderstanding of science and technology.

@MrRaul8Z Жыл бұрын

Beautifully made analysis, with interesting and sound conclusions too.

@sohybali2696 2 жыл бұрын

Extremely illuminating, thank you a lot

@namyx_71 2 жыл бұрын

I know this is going to be worth my time already!

@juliabalch 2 жыл бұрын

Jorgensen was my orgo professor at Yale, if his long-winded ramblings were any indications his work on simulating water was the basis of a lot of computational chemistry for biomolecules. Basically, all other work on simulating carbohydrates, proteins, etc needs to use this work on water to figure out what conformations molecules will take in an aqueous environment. I think it was especially important to understanding the thermodynamics of protein folding

@vivekchedambaram1285 2 жыл бұрын

I'm glad I cited your channel. Great content and editing. You've just earned a sub. Cheers

@tadhgtwo 2 жыл бұрын

Interesting video Simon. Can't wait for the next one.

@JulieStardoll 2 жыл бұрын

amazing! i need to do this as a challenge someday!

@Y-0 2 жыл бұрын

i see you aim for this to be a big video in terms of views, i hope it happens as i quite enjoyed it! Great title and thumbnail

@jakeleyhr9234 2 жыл бұрын

Great video Simon! One thing I think it’s interesting to consider beyond what you covered in the video is the dynamics of citations over time than many of these top papers get. If you look in the Nature article describing these top 100 papers, you can scroll through graphs of the number of citations each paper has got over the year and there are some interesting trends. For most of the papers, rather than steadily accumulating citations over time in an every-increasing manner, the citation counts peak 10-20 years after the original publication date. For example, No.19 on the list is a paper describing the molecular biology technique called “Southern Blotting”, used to detect specific sequences of DNA in a sample, that was first published in 1975. You can see the graph of citations over time increases up more than 2,000 citations per year around the year 1987, and then declines to less than 100 per year in the present day. This drop after the late 1980s was likely caused by the invention and propagation of a technique that now everyone has heard of: the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR), which is basically a much easier method of doing the same thing as a Southern blot, and is still widely used to this day. So in some cases this “peaking” of citation counts can represent one foundational technique being superseded by a new and improved technique, but I also wonder how a much more vague factor plays into this - a discovery or technique becoming such common knowledge that people stop bother to cite the original paper. I’ve published a few papers featuring molecular biology techniques for working with DNA, but we didn’t cite the original 1953 Watson and Crick paper describing the structure of DNA, nor the 1944 Avery et al paper that established DNA as the genetic material. These are fundamental to my work, but to the point of being so established that they fall into the same category as “the sky is blue” and “water is wet” - we just don’t feel the need to bother citing the original papers. Even when we use PCR, we don’t cite the original papers describing the technique. if every paper that used PCR cited the original papers from the 1980s, I’ve no doubt they would be among the most cited ever, but no one seems to bother. Of course, if all scientific papers referenced all their statements, no matter how mundane, they would become quite a chore to read, but I think it’s interesting to consider how this distorts the record of how influential some papers have been.

@TripleIProductions 2 жыл бұрын

Well done! I always thought this would be interesting, but couldn't be asked to do it myself. And great communication of what was in the litterature for the general population.

@a.artbart3020 2 жыл бұрын

I think (though this is just an hypothesis) that as the water paper is an early form of molecular dynamics simulation it might be a good reference for new md programs, I also had to learn about that paper so I guess people also really like it xp

@connordavis4766 2 жыл бұрын

I think a great thing to look at would be in-domain highest Z scores of citations. The citation norms between different areas are just too big to actually compare them in this way. I'd also be very interested in seeing some of the softer-science papers found using this method.

@_buns_ 2 жыл бұрын

Interesting observations drawn on what is considered the top cited paper. Very cool!

@fabianludescher7494 2 жыл бұрын

I don’t think people understand the work you put in for making this video, awesome work mate keep doing your thing🙌🏼

@ankushds7018 2 жыл бұрын

As a biologist, I can confirm that we use Assays all the time but also that we HATE doing it. It's a chore.

@JulieStardoll 2 жыл бұрын

simon can you do this challenge on physics papers alone? or maybe math and physics?

@zyzxzsgedr 2 жыл бұрын

@renderxtravels8464 2 жыл бұрын

I remember briefly meeting Simon at Uni, really nice dude. Keep up the good work!

@NVJosh 2 жыл бұрын

I really enjoyed the range of topics this video touched upon. A consideration that might have been interesting is how funding has affected the way these papers are used. Biology and machine learning will have huge industrial backing in the real because of their profitability in pharmaceutical and tech applications. Great video!

@TheSilentParadox 2 жыл бұрын

Simulating water could be high up because of computer and movie graphics. It is one of those problems a lot of people have to solve when simulating reality. I guess a lot of people have tried to find better ways, building on-top-of the solution suggested in that paper.

@deathbunny8322 2 жыл бұрын

Very good video, I am a social scientist specialising in bibliometrics and the mapping of science. What you say about single authored papers is actually very unique.

@Ni8mR Ай бұрын

Great insight, just subscribed to your channel!

@aniketchitre1566 2 жыл бұрын

Great video and I can appreciate that a lot of difficult reading went into making this one! I'm a PhD student at Cambridge, doing some molecular simulation in my project, so I can hazard a guess the reason that "comparision of simple potential function for simulating liquid water" paper is so highly cited is because: the choice of force field/potential function is crucial to molecular simulations (both molecular dynamics and monte carlo techniques), as it's what describes the forces between atoms in our in-silico system (simulation box). It was actually surprisingly difficult to get a force field to accurately reproduce the properties of water through simulation - in fact, there are some 80,000+ studies of this alone in the molecular simulation literature. Secondly, water is pretty much in any biological/most chemical systems, so there must be a lot of scientists, who go back and cite this when describing the choices of force field in their study - perhaps, I should too! Hope that explains it :)

@petrskupa6292 2 жыл бұрын

Is it really that difficult to find top ranked papers in classic scientific database search tools like Scopus or WoS? (I wouldn’t even think about any other way before going there).

@gustinelimurilo 2 жыл бұрын

Great video! There's a Machine Learning paper that has over 100k citations. It was published in 2016 and it's called "Deep residual learning for image recognition", He, Kaiming, et al.

@Alhamzah_F_Abbas 2 жыл бұрын

Certainly amazing video, stimulate your curiosity in sciences 👍

@viachaslautsyvina2169 2 жыл бұрын

As a person recently graduated with PhD I wonder how much time did it take to even skim through those papers. A scientific paper is not an easy read even if it's in your area of research and here so many where from unfamiliar fields for you. P.S. Great job! Interesting video. Now I wonder if some scrapper with greedy algorithm(i.e. jump to the reference with the most citations) starting from some random papers could find most entries from this list.

@SimonClark 2 жыл бұрын

Congratulations on your graduation! So as I'm sure you found during the PhD, a lot of the paper reading was truthfully 'topping and tailing', i.e. reading the abstract, introduction and summary/conclusions. For a fair few papers though I did make an effort to read the main body to try and understand, though for those out of my academic background, it was at this point that I had to tap out as it just became impenetrable. Having said that, for a surprising number of papers, they were actually easy enough to understand all the way through!

@Gakulon 2 жыл бұрын

As a geology student it is a little sad to see zero Earth science papers in the list, but I think it was worth it for that little quip towards the end there lol

@iconoclasticistherr9965 2 жыл бұрын

Great idea for a video! If you want to do a reprise, it might be neat to see most cited papers of each discipline separately. As you mentioned, there's not as many citations for certain kinds of work. I'm especially interested in the top 10-20 of pure math -- I imagine a lot are related to Shelah's work for the same reason.

@simonnorris8076 2 жыл бұрын

Great video Simon. Although not covered much in the video, I imagine a lot of the crystallography papers also had a biological bent to them? I seem to remember some of the big biological structural breakthroughs in the 20th century came through the development of crystallography. I think it's be really cool if you made a video similar to this, but discussing some of the oldest know scientific papers, see how the approach and understand have changed, and whether the science still holds relevance today

@2001Pieps 2 жыл бұрын

The water simulation paper is definitely in the field of statistical mechanics/thermodynamics. So I don't think it's used for macroscopic simulations like the flow of the river. I'm afraid the dreaded physical chemistry is involved, which inherently scares me as a biochemistry student.

@simpl51 2 жыл бұрын

Hmm, interesting, almost all steps ro make pharmaceutical active ingredients are carried out in non-aqueous solvemts

@arjunpal8340 2 жыл бұрын

Since you found the Neighbour joining Method of phylogenetic analysis interesting, you might find maximum likelihood and bayesian phylogenetic genetic analyses more interesting. These techniques along with a few others have made biology and computational analysis almost inseparable.

@LC-rw3lt 2 жыл бұрын

Thanks for making this video, it makes me realize that the master research I’m doing now will become one of the most memorable things I left in this world after I pass away! I mean if it produce a very good outcome 😄 I am motivated!

@kendrajohnson6535 2 жыл бұрын

Very, very cool! Thank you Simon :)

@CellRus 2 жыл бұрын

Biology is the coolest science, it literally draws the knowledge of all the other science, chemistry, physics, and maths and even computer science and statistical analyses together. I love the interdisciplinary it has. Amazing. I'm so proud to be part of it.

@isabellawalser4150 2 жыл бұрын

I think your meta-scientific thoughts would actually be worthwhile sharing in a journal dedicated to the philosophy or history of science. This video cannot be cited, but I'm sure many people who don't even know your channel exists would love to cite your findings.

@ameliajones4641 2 жыл бұрын

Great video!! I think it would be really interesting to do this for humanities subjects! :)

@bankerduck4925 2 жыл бұрын

This was marvellous. I'm not a science guy, but I can appreciate good work and a fascinating story. Along with some history of course, and all of that I loved in this video. Thank you and thank the men and women who wrote those Scientific papers.

@demianfgomez 2 жыл бұрын

Great video! interesting review for sure! One thing that is really interesting to discuss here is gender inequality and how most (if not all of these authors) are men. Despite women in STEM have grown significantly (or actually started to be recognized by their work), there is still a long way to go...

@piotrarturklos 2 жыл бұрын

Very true, we need progress in gender equality. It takes time before women spread in male-dominated fields in large enough numbers that all the young girls can find a female role model. And this is just an example of a reason why this is a hard problem.

@marcuslitchfield4653 2 жыл бұрын

It's important to remember that a paper can also have a great number of citations if it's published by well known people but has gross inaccuracies or illogical conclusions. Other papers may cite it with the intention of contradicting it.

@hamzamahboub7333 2 жыл бұрын

best idea ever on youtube 💗 just I wish you do the same focusing on renewable energy field maybe top 10 or 20

@scitechshow 2 жыл бұрын

Great video! We use all those techniques in my biochemistry lab. I had no idea these were the top cited papers.

@princessbenny9909 2 жыл бұрын

I want to resist the urge...but yknow...first

@davidlakhter 2 жыл бұрын

great video concept!

@maryams79 2 жыл бұрын

The Editing is crazy🔥💯

@klap7161 2 жыл бұрын

Great video! Good job

@cameroncochrane3929 2 жыл бұрын

For the water simulation paper, it's probably so high up because it sets the ground for computational biology, as all biological and biochemical reactions/interactions in cellular organisms take place in aqueous media. This can include protein modelling, DNA/RNA modelling, determining cellular biochemical reactions such as cellular respiration and photosynthesis, and the modelling of drug interactions in pharmaceutical science and medicine (and very importantly, vaccines). I've come across the importance of modelling water-based systems a lot during my PhD studies in Chemistry. Excellent video as always :)

@intipazl1080 Жыл бұрын

Men I'm professional biotechnology engineering and this is a gold mine to me! I'm very happy I could found this video, thank you for supporting science. Greetings from Chile!

@iHadar 2 жыл бұрын

Superb content. I presume a more updated list would have included much more CS papers. hell, every other day a 20k citations deep learning paper is being released !

@dereknewbury163 2 жыл бұрын

Great video. Thanks

@DSC141 2 жыл бұрын

Brilliant and interesting Video! I agree with what you said about the limitations of using this method to rank papers. Something that came to mind is that this method will be biased towards historical papers (as you saw) because new papers have had less time to be cited. A paper that came out a year ago can't be compared to a 100 year old paper in this way.

@sjege 2 жыл бұрын

As a Lifesciebce student it is great seeing this info shared with more people!

@mairathorn3331 2 жыл бұрын

Thank you for explaining those papers and saving our time. And I have a request to you about showing a life or work of a PhD student of Anthropology as I am one of them but from India but would love to know about knowing how scholars from other countries are working? Hope you can make a video of this.