Do Nobel Prize Winners Write Citation Classics?

In the recently concluded series on the 1,000 articles most cited in the Science Citation Inde# (.SCP ), 1961 to 1982, I drew attention to the many Nobel laureates who were authors of one or more of these highly cited papers. 1 It was no surprise that 14 percent of the 1,000 papers were written by Nobel Prize winners, since we knew that as a group they are heavily cited. In 1965 Irv Sher, ISP’s director of development and quality control, and I examined the 1961 citations to the work of the 1962 and 1963 Nobel laureates in chemistry, physics, and physiology or medicine. We determined that these authors were cited roughly 30 times as often as the average author. z In that study we were counting citations to any and all works by a particular author. We were not then attempting to determine whether an author’s citation count represented one or more Citation Classics or a prolific output in which average or slightly above average citations to many works added up to a high count. My purpose here is to pose the question, “Do all or most Nobel Prize winners in the sciences write at least one highly cited work, a Citation Classic?” To answer this question let us consider the 125 Nobel Prize winners in chemistry, physics, and physiology or medicine from 1965 to 1984. Of these, 104 (or about 83 percent) have written at least iune Y, lYUb