Really enjoyed the relationship between this paper's title and the graph of its citation frequency:<p><a href="http://i.imgur.com/RO6BVRx.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/RO6BVRx.png</a>
Flipped through to find whether genomics/bioinformatics would be well represented; there were at least 2 papers on BLAST in the top 15, and 4th paper is the Sanger method. But where is Watson & Crick?<p>My guess is that all of the subsequent papers that uses BLAST as a tool have to cite it; similarly all sequencing papers cite Sanger as a tool which is why its citation rate dropped when next-gen sequencing method replaced it - which goes to show citation is not an accurate measure of scientific impact because it is equivalent of citing "Git/compiler/IDE" for a software project.
An interesting follow-up would be to run PageRank on the citation graph. That should lower the importance of the scientific methods papers since they are likely to be cited by a very large number of random papers of limited importance, which bumping up papers that have led to further work that is itself important.
Two of the top 10 are different editions of a laboratory manual: Sambrook, J., Fritsch, E. F. & Maniatis, T. Molecular Cloning (1989), and Maniatis, T., Fritsch, E. F. & Sambrook, J. Molecular Cloning: A Laboratory Manual (1982).<p>Citing Laemmli et al was <i>de rigueur</i> for many years, while it was certainly an influential technique, it doesn't rank above the discovery of DNA.
What I find interesting is that many papers use references from the 70's and some times even 100 years old, in where they used very crude tools to come to certain conclusions.<p>I'm not saying we should discard old science discoveries, but it would be interesting redoing the experiments with today's technology.
This is purely anecdotal, but one of my favorites is "Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations."<p><a href="http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/17/2/152.abstract" rel="nofollow">http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/17/2/152.abstract</a>