The first quarter of the twenty-first century has produced some huge scientific breakthroughs, ranging from the first mRNA vaccines and CRISPR-based gene-editing techniques to the discovery of the Higgs boson and the first measurements of gravitational waves. But you won't find any of these advances described in the top-cited papers published since 2000. That is one of the findings of an analysis by Nature's news team of the 25 most-cited papers published in the twenty-first century. The articles garnering the most citations report developments in artificial intelligence (AI); approaches to improve the quality of research or systematic reviews; cancer statistics; and research software. However, a pioneering 2004 paper on experiments with graphene1 ' work that won its authors the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010 ' is also among the twenty-first century's most-cited. Citations ' the means by which authors acknowledge previous sources in the literature ' are one measure of a paper's...
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