List of Important Publications in Computer Science

In some areas the list is certainly not accurate. E.g. in computational linguistics:<p>- <i>Realization of Natural-Language Interfaces Using Lazy Functional Programming</i>, Frost, 2006. I never ever heard of this article, with only 17 citations overall (in 5 years) it can hardly be considered important.<p>- In the entry of <i>Transformation-based error-driven learning and natural language processing</i>, Brill, 1995 (which is an important publication) it is stated that it <i>"Describes a now commonly-used POS tagger based on transformation-based learning."</i> Which is not true, since nearly everyone uses HMM, maxent, or SVM taggers these days because they give far higher accuracies.<p>Although it is far from perfect, the number of citations is probably one of the best manners to count importance. Someone actually did this per year for ACL conferences:<p><a href="http://www.phontron.com/blog/?p=29" rel="nofollow">http://www.phontron.com/blog/?p=29</a><p>Obviously, there are other conferences, journals, etc. But it gives a pretty good overview of papers that are recommended. Also, there's the ACL top-10 rankings:<p><a href="http://clair.si.umich.edu/clair/anthology/rankings.cgi" rel="nofollow">http://clair.si.umich.edu/clair/anthology/rankings.cgi</a>

I took a look at the area that I am familiar with (database). If you'd like to gain more understanding about the area, it's probably better to look at required reading list from Berkeley and Stanford. (Note that the Berkeley list is longer.)<p><a href="http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/GradAffairs/CS/Prelims/db.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/GradAffairs/CS/Prelims/db.html</a><p><a href="http://infolab.stanford.edu/db_pages/infoquallist.html" rel="nofollow">http://infolab.stanford.edu/db_pages/infoquallist.html</a>

Striking how old most of these papers are, many from the 60s and 70s, very few from the 00s.<p>Those who don't learn from the past are destined to reinvent it, poorly.

If you're an aspiring computer science researcher looking at these articles, I cannot recommend enough Hamming's speach "You and Your Research." (<a href="http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html</a>)<p>He talks about the little optimizations you can do in your life to take your research to world-class level.