The 1983 Articles Most Cited in 1983 and 1984. 1 Life Sciences

While many papers achieve high impact over a long period of time, others have more immediate impact. One measure of that immediacy is citation frequency. If a paper is highly cited shortly after publication, it usually indicates that a new, active area of research is developing. or it may indicate a controversial topic. Providing lists of fast-track papers, however, does not necessarily identify the most “important” publications. AS we have shown before, many significant papers eventually achieve high and long-lasting impact. The reasons for their delayed recognition have been discussed earlier. 1 And we intend to discuss this phenomenon in more detaif in the future. Nevertheless, citation frequency analysis can indicate the growth and development of various fields, helping to identify the “hot” areas of research. Indeed, most of the 1983 papers included in this study help form the core literature of new research frents. These have been identtiled through the .Sciersce Citation Indexm (SCF ) and Social Sciences Citation Index@ (SSCF) databases. The first study in this series was published in 1979. It covered the most-cited life-sciences articles of 1976.2 Many of the articles in that study are still being highly cited today, almost 10 years after publication. In fact, over one-third of those papers have become Chation Classics cited over 40U times. Of these, seven authors have already published Citation Classicm commentaries. ThB essay discusses the most-cited life-sciences articles published in 1983. Table 1 lists the 102 articles in this study, in alphabetic order by first author. These articles averaged 96 citations, 20 in 1983 and 75 in 1984, and ranged from 200 to 64 citations. To categorize these papers into broad subject areas, we used ISF’s database of research fronts.s Of the 102 papers, 95 are core to 48 1983-1984 SCVSSCZ research fronts.