The Most Frequently Cited Astronomical Papers Published During the Past Decade

From the Institute for Scientific Information we obtained the list of the 100 astronomical papers published worldwide in 1988-1997 that received the highest numbers of citations in the same interval. We augmented it with citation counts in 1998. Because papers published late in that decade had less chance of being cited, we converted the order in the list to citations per year, although we do not make use of the positions within the list. Despite the bias for the earlier papers to be included in this list, we consider them representative of the highly-cited recent papers. The results are: ~1! half of the papers concern extragalactic objects and cosmology while one-third concern stars; ~2! the numbers of observational and theoretical ~including reinterpretations of published data ! papers are equal; ~3! half of the papers are based on optical-region data and about one-sixth each on radio and X-ray data;~4! the first authors came from 16 different countries, indicating that the highly-cited astronomical research has become international; ~5! of the 51 observational and instrumental papers, 47% are based on data from 13 spacecraft, 42% on data from 15 ground-based optical observatories, and 11% from six ground-based radio observatories; ~6! among the 14 journals represented in this list, we found that 4.4% of the papers published in the Annual Reviews of Astronomy and Astrophysics papers were included, 2.2% of the ApJS papers, 1.4% of the Nature papers, and 0.2% of the papers in each of six other journals.