Altmetric data on top 100 articles by citations (as reported in 2014)

An article published recently in Nature looked at the top 100 most highly cited papers from 1900 onwards, based on data from the Thomson Reuters Web of Science Database.

The article highlighted that it is (perhaps unsurprisingly) much older articles that have accrued the majority of citations to date and therefore dominate the list – with more recent breakthroughs and nobel-prize winning advances struggling to compete with the 12,119 citations it would take to rank in the top 100.

We were curious to see what other kind of attention these articles might have been receiving in recent years. At Altmetric our data goes back reliably until November 2012 – meaning that we have been tracking our sources for any mentions of those articles since then.

This dataset lists counts in different data sources tracked by Altmetric for the top 100 articles listed in the Nature piece.