For as long as the annual topcited papers lists have been around, the all-time champion has been Weinberg’s “A model of leptons”, the 1967 paper that laid the foundation stone for the Standard Model. 30 years later, in November of 1997, the paper The Large N limit of superconformal field theories and supergravity by Maldacena appeared that established a connection between string theory and quantum field theory. It immediately set of a revolution in HEP and was the most highly cited paper ever since. Remarkably, its highest citation count was in 2010, where it received over 1,000 citations in a single year! One reason for this is the heavy ion results from Brookhaven that drew people to conclude that, based on Maldacena’s work, the quark gluon plasma can be modeled using string theory techniques.
