From the article .....
The discovery of high-temperature superconductors, the determination of DNA's double-helix structure, the first observations that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating - all of these breakthroughs won Nobel prizes and international acclaim. Yet none of the papers that announced them comes anywhere close to ranking among the 100 most highly cited papers of all time.
Citations, in which one paper refers to earlier works, are the standard means by which authors acknowledge the source of their methods, ideas and findings, and are often used as a rough measure of a paper's importance. Fifty years ago, Eugene Garfield published the Science Citation Index (SCI), the first systematic effort to track citations in the scientific literature. To mark the anniversary,Natureasked Thomson Reuters, which now owns the SCI, to list the 100 most highly cited papers of all time. (See the full list atWeb of Science Top 100.xlsor theinteractive graphic, below.) The search covered all of Thomson Reuter's Web of Science, an online version of the SCI that also includes databases covering the social sciences, arts and humanities, conference proceedings and some books. It lists papers published from 1900 to the present day.
I'm surprised that BLAST is not the most highly cited bioinformatics paper (the Clustal W paper holds that honor). Even though it is commonplace for people to mention BLAST by name and not cite it, I still would have thought it would be at the top of the list.
EDIT: I see, the gapped-BLAST/PSI-BLAST paper is right behind the original BLAST paper, so I guess BLAST is the most highly cited bioinformatics software. Though, the Clustal X publication is right behind that second BLAST publication with >24k citations. That is very interesting, I think it says a lot about the stability/usability of these tools.
On the list two papers cite BLAST and two cite CLUSTAL but the sum of the BLAST papers is higher
Thanks, I noticed that after I commented but didn't post my edit before you posted. Anyway, I'm still a little surprised by this but I don't think it really matters what is #1 by this metric, they have both clearly been really important in bioinformatics since the beginning.