From AcaWiki

We are driving towards gathering summaries of the Top 100 academic papers in the world. This is a large effort to increase the number of our papers, get more students, more researchers, and academics to know about the project and share their specific knowledge. We need your specific expertise to make this project sucessful.

HOWTO

The original idea came from the community.

To make this work we need to:

• (DONE) Create a list of the Top 20 Domains
• Help edit this wiki (its open for you to help with!)
• Create sources per domain where to pull from.
• Develop leaders per domain
• Get at least 5 papers per domain
  • Think that another paper is more important than the 5 already listed? Summarize it and add it to the list!

Additional Resources

• What papers should everyone read? - Theoretical Computer Science

• The five most cited papers

• Most Cited Computer Science Articles

• List of important publications in computer science

• The 100 Most-Cited Scientists

• ISIHighlyCited.com

• Most cited authors of books in the humanities, 2007

• Most-Cited Researchers, 1983-2002

• Research Papers in Economics

• Google Scholar - a new data source for citation analysis

• Journal Citation Reports

• Google Scholar: The New Generation of Citation Indexes

• International Journal of Libraries and Information Services

Collaboration and Communication

Please join us in spreading the news about this drive, and join us in chat as well!

• Public Social Networks
• Our Communication Channels

Top 100 Papers

Anthropology

Sources

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People

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Papers

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Arts and Literature

Sources

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People

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• Username: Spanther

Papers

Death of the author

What is an author?

Why conceptual writing? Why now?

The fate of echo

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Astronomy

Sources

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People

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Biology

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Business

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Papers

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Chemistry

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Clinical Research

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Computer Science

Sources

• Stack Exchange: What papers should everyone read?
  • NB: User contributions on Stack Exchange are licensed under cc-wiki with attribution required
• Turing Award winners (WP), including papers they've written and the Turing Award lectures

People

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Papers

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A mathematical theory of communication

"A mathematical theory of communication" by Claude Shannon, classics of information theory. Very readable. (Alternative link.)

cc-by-sa attribution

On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem

The 1936 paper that arguably started computer science:

Alan Turing, "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem", Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society s2-42, 230–265, 1937. doi: 10.1112/plms/s2-42.1.230

In just 36 pages, Turing formulates (but does not name) the Turing Machine, recasts Gödel's famous First Incompleteness Theorem in terms of computation, describes the concept of universality, and in the appendix shows that computability by Turing machines is equivalent to computability by λ-definable functions (as studied by Church and Kleene).

cc-by-sa attribution

Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?

"Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style? A Functional Style and Its Algebra of Programs" by John Backus. This is the 1977 ACM Turing Award Lecture in which Backus introduces functional programming to the world. ACM honored Backus with this award for his seminal work on FORTRAN and for being the B in BNF notation used for describing programming language syntax. I found this work to be really inspiring. It caused me to look at computers and programming languages in a whole new way.

It also represents the kind of paper I wish there were more of. It exposes the inspiration and thought processing behind a nest of ideas without the rigorous but limiting tone of a research paper. It is a shame that researchers have to wait for an opportunity like the ACM Turing Award to be able to express themselves in this mode. Of course, few researchers can write like John Backus. This papers clarity of vision amazes me.

cc-by-sa attribution (comments from Paul Topping)

Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.

Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. By D. C. Engelbart. (1962) SRI Summary Report AFOSR-3223 [1]

Economics

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Education

Sources

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People

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  • User:Viovio

Papers

Crisis in the humanities

• Summarized! :)

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Engineering

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Geosciences

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Health

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Mathematics

Sources

• mathoverflow: A single paper everyone should read?
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Papers

The Yang-Mills Equations over Riemann Surfaces

The Yang-Mills Equations over Riemann Surfaces Author(s): M. F. Atiyah and R. Bott Source: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Mathematical and Physical Sciences, Vol. 308, No. 1505 (Mar. 17, 1983), pp. 523-615 Published by: The Royal Society copy from JSTOR} [http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsta.1983.0017 find by DOI

One professor called it "the basis for truly 21st century mathematics." It is also reportedly accessible by beginning graduate students with some exposure to differential geometry and suitable for independent study or as a reading course. It is a 93 page paper and develops a lot of fundamental constructions and ideas from scratch. Here is Martin Guest's review on MathSciNet. -Justin Kerry at cc-by-sa attribution

For about 5 years I carried my copy with me everywhere I went, in an increasingly decrepit 3-ring binder weighed down by page after page of my own notes and explanations. One day, at a conference, a dispute arose over whether the main result of the paper held with integral coefficients or required one to work over the rationals. In the flash of an eye, four or five of us pulled out our copies and opened to the relevant page. Luckily, I was right: integral coefficients. The first time I left home without the paper, it felt like a rite of passage. Or at least that's the way I remember it. – Dan Ramras at cc-by-sa attribution

On formally undecidable propositions of Principia Mathematica and related systems

Kurt Gödel's On formally undecidable propositions of Principia Mathematica and related systems. See its Wikipedia article

cc-by-sa attribution

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Medicine

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Neuroscience

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Philosophy

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Papers

The importance of Bruno Latour for philosophy

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Physics

Sources

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• Posting a question at Physics Overflow might yield some interesting responses

People

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Papers

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences by Eugene Wigner

cc-by-sa attribution

Quantum Mechanical Computers

Quantum Mechanical Computers (PDF) by Richard Feynman.

He introduces the idea of quantum computation, describes quantum circuits, explains how classical circuits can be simulated by quantum circuits, and shows how quantum circuits can compute functions without lots of garbage qubits (using uncomputation).

He then shows how any classical circuit can be encoded into a time-independent Hamiltonian! His proof goes through for quantum circuits too, therefore showing that time evolving Hamiltonians is BQP-hard! His Hamiltonian construction is also used in the proof of the quantum version of the Cook-Levin theorem, proved by Kitaev, which shows that k-local Hamiltonian is QMA-complete. cc-by-sa attribution

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Psychology

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Papers

• "Why Do Humans Reason? Arguments for an Argumentative Theory," by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Vol. 34, No. 2, pp. 57-74, 2011

Jonathan Haidt said "so important that the abstracts... should be posted in psychology departments all over the country." and that “the article is one of my favorite papers of the last ten years. I believe that they have solved one of the most important and longstanding puzzles in psychology: why are we so good at reasoning in some cases, but so hopelessly biased in others?

• The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience
• The magical number seven, plus or minus two, see Wikipedia
• Cohen, J. (1960). A coefficient of agreement for nominal scales. Educational and Psychological Measurement Vol.20, No.1 , 37-46. --widely used in interannotator agreement
• Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to Authority. New York: Harper and Row. See Wikipedia
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Sociology

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People

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Sociology Papers

Sociology is a big field with many branches (e.g. network research, health communication, media effects, organizational communication, classical sociology, etc.). Perhaps it would be better to make top 5's for each?

• Bowker, G. C., & Star, S. L. (1999). Sorting things out: Classification and its consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Granovetter, M. (1983). "The strength of weak ties: A network theory revisited". Sociological Theory 1: 201–233. doi:10.2307/202051. JSTOR 202051.
• Watts, D. J. (2004). The new science of networks. Annual Review of Sociology, 30(1), 243-270. DOI:10.1146/annurev.soc.30.020404.104342, see also [2]

Reification and utopia in mass culture

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