The most cited paper in physics (and/or chemistry) is, last I heard, by Walter Kohn. In fact, if I recall correctly he wrote the top two: Hohenberg & Kohn and Kohn & Sham.<p>I hear that one of his favourite observations, though, is that you're not <i>really</i> famous until they <i>stop</i> citing you. I mean, who cites Newton?
Misleading headline (exposing a science bias). The article states "This paper, which is featured here as a JBC Classic, is the most highly cited paper in <i>science</i>." I don't happen to know if it is still the most cited paper ever, but this article can't actually make that claim without doing the bibliometrics for <i>all</i> of academia.
The original BLAST paper has >34,000 incoming links or references, according to Google Scholar.<p><a href="http://www2.cs.fit.edu/~dmitra/Compbio/Resources/altschuletal1990.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www2.cs.fit.edu/~dmitra/Compbio/Resources/altschuleta...</a><p>Edit: see replies, etc.