Since the mid-1980s, superstring
theory has been the leading candidate for a successful theory that
unites quantum theory with Einstein's general relativity, albeit one
that posits that a 10-dimensional universe and is, as of yet,
unverifiable. The great majority of the top 25 papers in the field
document the progress of the past decade, as string theorists came to
understand the correspondence between their string theories on a type
of negatively curved space, known as anti-deSitter space, and a type
of theory, known as a gauge theory, that describes the universe in
which we live. To do so, string theorists employed correlations, known
as dualities, to analyze the role and characteristics of massless
black holes, monopoles, solitons, and various formulations of
multi-dimensional membranes—known as branes and particularly d-branes—in
the different formulations of the string theories. The top 25 papers
also include discussions of the 11-dimensional supermembrane theory
that seems to encompass all the 10-dimensional string theories, and
the role of the holographic principle, stating that a theory within a
region of space-time is equivalent to a theory on the boundary of that
region. Finally, they include papers proposing that the extra
dimensions posited by string theory, for instance, can be sufficiently
large to have phenomenological implications.
Methodology
To construct this database,
papers were extracted based on title-and author-supplied keywords for
the Special Topic Branes. The keyword was brane*.
The baseline time span for this database
is 1991 - November 2001. The resulting database contained 3,257 papers;
1,931 authors; 58 countries; 75 journals; and 646 institutions.
Please read this note about the listings and statistics presented in this Special Topic on
Branes.
Rankings
Once the database was in place,
it was used to generate the lists of top 25 papers, authors, journals,
institutions, and nations, covering a time span of 1991 - November
2001.
The top 25 papers are ranked
according to total cites. Rankings for author, journal, institution,
and country are listed in three ways: according to total
cites, total papers, and total cites/paper.
