Eugene Garfield | Jul 9, 2000 | 4 min read
Eugene Garfield Our reader surveys indicate that "Hot Papers" is one of our most popular editorial features. When and how did it begin? After the Science Citation Index was launched in the '60s, we soon learned that the age of the average cited paper, depending upon the field, was 5 to 15 years old. In molecular biology, while 25 percent of cited papers were about 2 years old, the rest were much older. These data initially obscured the fact that a small group of papers were well ci