The most cited papers for cryptography are almost all concerned with quantum cryptography. Quantum cryptography
is aimed at constructing methods of secure communication at the quantum level that cannot be eavesdropped without being detected. These approaches are based on the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle which states that the act of observing a system will alter it. Many of the key papers in this field were written in the early 1990s by researchers at Oxford (Artur Ekert) and IBM (Charles H. Bennett). Later papers extend these methods to noisy channels of communication, and the idea of privacy amplification. Other papers on the list deal with non-quantum topics such as Hamming weights and image encryption.
In Essential Science
Indicators®, Charles H. Bennett is listed among the top 1% cited authors in physics. Artur Ekert has 12 highly cited papers listed in ESI, and his 1991 paper is ranked 230th in physics as of the second bimonthly update of 2001.
Methodology
To construct this database,
papers were extracted based on title- and author-supplied keywords for
cryptography. The keywords used were as follows: cipher*, cryptanaly*,
cryptogra*, decrypt*, encrypt*, public-key, public key.
Note: (*) denotes a wild card.
The baseline time
span for this database is 1991 - 2000. The resulting database contained
2,141 papers; 2,304 authors; 60 countries; 460 journals; and 891
institutions.
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 1991-2000.
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 papers, total
cites, and total cites/paper.
