Do neutrinos have mass? This question
has haunted the fields of high-energy physics and cosmology for
decades. Over the past few years, evidence has accumulated in favor of
neutrino mass, and articles reporting on that evidence dominate the 25
most-cited papers in this Special Topic. These articles include
experimental reports from underground detectors around the world
measuring the flux of atmospheric neutrinos or comparing the fluxes of
different neutrino flavors in the search for a phenomenon known as
neutrino oscillations. These oscillations would occur only if
neutrinos did have mass. Other articles report on neutrino oscillation
searches from long baseline reactor experiments. Also among the top 25
papers are articles that examine solar models of neutrino production
to evaluate the model-dependent influences on neutrino flux
predictions. Finally, the list closes out with articles discussing the
impact of finite neutrino masses on the dark matter problem and
large-scale structure formation in the universe.
Methodology
To construct this database,
papers were extracted based on title-and author-supplied keywords for
neutrinos. The keyword used was: NEUTRINO*.
The baseline time span for this database
is 1992 - 2002. The resulting database contained 9,271 papers; 15,498 authors;
83 countries; 272 journals; and 2,090 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 1992 - 2002.
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. The paper thresholds used to determine scientist, institution, country, and journal rankings according to total cites/paper were as follows:
45, 110, 110, and 33, respectively.
