Interesting article, but… have BB started doing clickbait headlines?
“You’ll be suprised” isn’t much different from “You won’t believe what…” or “The answer might shock and amaze you”.
Number 2 on the list was published by Nature itself 44 years ago, and has been cited 213,005 times… yet they still won’t let me read it unless I pay them £22.
I wonder how many of the top 100 are actually accessible?
I wonder what the most cited papers were in the 1950’s.
Now i know what to “cite” every time my message-board nemesis uses his pesky retort…
I dunno. People cite page sixteen of some John guy’s third volume quite a bit.
[citation needed]
As a computational biologist I’m pleased to see how well bioinformatics tools did. CLUSTALW (a multiple sequence alignment program) and BLAST (a sequence similarity tool) made it into the top 15.
This is actually a good point. While I’m a fan of real Open Access, I can somewhat understand journals that only make papers free after six months or a year – it is a compromise between supporting a business model and helping the scientific community. What I cannot abide is the policy of Nature (and bizarrely, even Science, which is run by the non-profit organization American Society for the Advancement of Science) where papers stay literally forever behind a pay wall.
You might find it interesting to know that literary historians have started using some programs designed for genetic sequencing to analyze stories (but I am, of course, assuming genetic sequencing tools are what I think they are). A computer takes the text of something like the Epic of Gilgamesh and treats wording like a genetic sequence. By comparing different tellings of the story the machine can provide branches of the story’s evolution, and, what is most interesting to literary studies, it is able to determine which telling is the oldest.
Actually, the making of evolutionary trees of manuscripts actually predates that of sequencing and even evolutionary biology itself. Even before the Origin of Species people like Karl Lachmann were making trees of manuscripts. But of course these were done by hand rather than by algorithms and were somewhat ad-hoc.
But yes, in recent years programs (like PAUP and PHYLIP) which were designed for biological data have been applied to manuscripts.
You must be new around here.
My bad, I didn’t make myself very clear. I didn’t mean to suggest such a practice has only now come about, just that those efforts* have greatly benefited from computer programs for genetics research.
*:Though if my efforts were to protect my professional career by fervently advocating reception of one telling as the most authentic but computers suggest otherwise then those programs would actually be a great hindrance to my efforts. Haha.
No surprise protein and cleavage get the most clicks.
Lowry’s paper has been #1 since the Science Citation Index was 1st published many, many moons ago.
It’s nice to see a more scientific approach taken in that field. More of this, please, everywhere.
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