The magnitude 7.3 earthquake that hit Landers, California on June 28, 1992 was not only the largest to strike the contiguous U.S. in 50 years, but was assuredly the most intensely studied of any earthquake in history. As a result, the list of most-cited papers in earthquake research is dominated by analyses and models of the Landers Earthquake and its accompanying pattern of fore- and after-shocks. These include its effect on the San Andreas Fault and future earthquakes in the region, and the use of orbiting high-resolution radar to capture movements produced by the earthquake, with implications for global seismic modeling. Another cluster of papers in the top 20 list examine the negative health sequelae of various earthquakes—in particular, sudden cardiac death, post traumatic stress in children, and psychological reactions. Other notable papers on the list are the creation of an updated database of 100,000 seismic events between 1964 and 1995, and analyses of earthquake nucleation phases and other earthquake features with an eye toward judging earthquake size, and perhaps estimating short- and intermediate-term earthquake probabilities.
Methodology
To construct this database,
papers were extracted based on title-supplied keywords for
earthquakes. The keywords used were as follows:
earthquake*
The baseline time span for this database
is 1993 - 2003 (third bimonthly). The resulting database contained 6,114 papers;
8,857 authors; 102 countries; 756 journals; and 2,375 institutions.
Rankings
Once the database was in place,
it was used to generate the lists of top 20 papers, authors, journals,
institutions, and nations, covering a time span of 1993 - 2003 (third
bimonthly).
The top 20 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. The paper thresholds used to determine scientist, institution, country, and journal rankings according to total cites/paper were as follows:
19, 45, 41, and 30 respectively.
