In the world of topcited papers, 2014 looked a lot like 2013 and not just because the Review of Particle Physics is once again at the top. The effects of 2012’s discovery of the Higgs boson continued to be strongly felt and many of the related papers from the 2013 topcite list appeared again in more or less the same position. Along with the discovery papers themselves [1,2], the original theory papers [34,35] and the detector description papers [17,19], a host of papers relevant to event simulation at the LHC [4,7,9,12,14,20,22,28,31] have featured prominently; interestingly, the PYTHIA paper [4] is now the first paper from the 2000s in the All Time Topcite list. The AdS/CFT papers [5,10,16] and Randall-Sundrum [26] continue their 15+ year run on the Topcite list. Planck [3], WMAP [11,24] and the 1998 supernova cosmology papers [13,15] again represent observational cosmology on the list.
So what was new this year? The March announcement [6] by BICEP2 of the results of a search for inflationary gravitational waves in the cosmic microwave background had an immediate impact and the paper had 100 citations within two weeks and 500 by July. This got people thinking about inflation and brought back a number of inflation papers from the 1980s to the topcite list [23,29,36,37] in addition to Guth’s perennial paper [21], which climbed twelve places in the rankings, and the Planck inflation paper [8], which climbed twenty one.
The remaining inductees were the October 2013 LUX constraints on dark matter paper [18] (that joined the similar XENON100 paper [27]) and the March 2013 Planck overview paper [38].
Rounding out the list were the electron antineutrino disappearance papers [30,33], Hawking’s black hole radiation paper [25], the dark energy review of Copeland et al. [32] and Minkowski’s sleeping beauty [39].
-Heath O’Connell