At the bottom of the list is a summary of the number of "best papers" by institution. Interestingly, Microsoft Research is at the top of the list:<p><pre><code> Microsoft Research 32.4
Stanford University 26.8
Massachusetts Institute of Technology 24.6
University of Washington 24.1
Carnegie Mellon University 22.9
University of California Berkeley 19.5
...</code></pre>
Just a small caveat: There is some evidence that best paper awards do not really correlate with great influence of those papers, as measured by the number of citations a paper receives afterwards [1].<p>[1] <a href="http://www.bartneck.de/publications/2009/scientometricAnalysisOfTheCHI/" rel="nofollow">http://www.bartneck.de/publications/2009/scientometricAnalys...</a>
I know this topic has been done to death but it still blows my mind that most of those papers are not freely available. It would be nice if the freely available ones were marked as such in the list.
Interestingly, "The Anatomy of a Search Engine" was not on this list.<p><a href="http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html" rel="nofollow">http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html</a>
As a biologist, where we emphasize publication over conferences, I am really curious as to what "best" means? Innovative? Most data to back hypothesis?
Reposting a worthy comment from user chimmy, who has been hellbanned for 1.5 years for no apparent reason:<p>> This is a great list but I would rather look at the most cited papers from that conference (say 10 years later). As an example, MapReduce did not win the best paper in OSDI 2004. However, it has impacted the industry like no other paper in that conference.