What is hot in sedimentary research over the millennium crossroad?

The world-wide and multidisciplinary Science Citation Index (SCI), available presently online as SCI Expanded via Web of Science from the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) in Philadelphia, has been applied as a powerful and reliable tool for the comprehensive study of citation patterns (GARFIELD 1979). Introductory bibliometric analyses for sedimentological literature were already presented in Journal of Sedimentary Petrology many years ago (MIDDLETON 1974, PILKLEY & WILCOX 1981, BODINE 1982). Hot Papers Database contains data on highly cited papers processed in the ISI databases during the last two years. Current information on the publication ‘hits’ in physics, chemistry, biology and medicine are regularly presented as What’s hot in Research? at the ISI homepage (www.isinet.com). For the geosciences, the list of most cited articles from 1981 was published by GARFIELD (1983), but contained almost exclusively papers in geophysics. The article presents this kind of updated ISI data (i.e., based on SCI Expanded) for the closely linked geological topics of sedimentology, sedimentary geology and sedimentary geochemistry, and is thought to be a continuation of the previous search by MIDDLETON (1974). SCI Expanded includes modern papers only (since 1996), having been indexed from ca. 5900 source ‘master’ journals. The identification of the highest cited references (as an important part of the intellectual essence of the discipline) and dynamic, rapidly developing research fronts are major tasks of the recent bibliometric studies, as is well shown in a refined approach to interdisciplinary climate research by SCHWECHHEIMER & WINTERHAGER (1999).