Top 10 Nanoscience Papers, 2000-09

Nanoscience – involving studies at the nanometer scale (a billionth of a metre) – is one of the fastest-growing realms of research today. A search of the Thomson Reuters ISI Web of Science database for articles with the wordstem “nano” in their titles produced about 6,500 items in 2000 and some 44,000 in 2009 – a greater than sixfold increase. If keywords and abstracts were included in the search, about 73,000 papers can be identified for 2009. While the majority appear in journals representing materials science, chemistry and physics, nano­science reports also appear in biological and biomedical titles and, in fact, in almost every field represented in the database.

The table above lists the 10 most cited papers in nanoscience published from 2000 to 2009. Citation totals are current as of August 2010. Naturally, older papers dominate the list, since they have had more years to accumulate citations than younger papers. These, then, may be considered “contemporary classics”. Among the so-called hot papers in Thomson Reuters’ Essential Science Indicators database – papers that are two years old or younger and highly cited – the most cited report is J.?N. Anker et al, “Biosensing with plasmonic nanosensors”, which was published in Nature in June 2008. It has received 250 citations to date.

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