inspired by the self improvement post over at scatterplot, in which the author describes her attempt to read the top 25 most cited articles in sociology, i went in search of the same in information & library science. i ended up finding a list in the 2009 article by levitt and thelwall, which ranks the top 82 in the field based on disciplinarity, annual citation patterns, and first author citation profiles. these are the 5 that top the list:
1. Hu M (1962) Visual-Pattern Recognition by Moment Invariants
2. Davis FD (1989) Perceived Usefulness, Perceived Ease of Use, and User Acceptance of Information Technology
3. Pawlak Z (1982) Rough Sets
4. Gruber TR (1993) A Translation Approach to Portable Ontology Specifications
5. Deerwester S, Dumais ST, Furnas GW, et al. (1990) Indexing by Latent Semantic Analysis
i read a lot and was surprised by how many articles in this list i haven’t seen before. it makes me wonder if “top citations” equal “essential reading.” what do YOU think? what would you consider essential articles in our field? would these 5 make your list?
Levitt, J.M., and Mike Thelwall (2009). The Most Highly Cited Library and Information Science Articles: Interdisciplinarity, First Authors and Citation Patterns. Scientometrics 78:1, pp. 45-67. DOI: 10.1007/s11192-007-1927-1
