The most-cited scientific paper of the 21st century was written by four Chinese researchers in 2016, and it is on track to become the most-cited paper of all time, according to an analysis by British scientific journal Nature.
The paper’s findings helped to pave the way for artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT and AlphaGo, beating out some of this century’s biggest scientific breakthroughs for citation impact.
An analysis released by Nature’s news arm on Tuesday examined the 25 papers published since 2000 with the highest number of citations across five academic citation databases, reaching the final list using the median across the databases.
The leading paper received between 103,756 and 254,074 citations, depending on the database consulted. Published at the 2016 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, the paper deals with ResNets, or deep residual learning networks.
Titled “Deep residual learning for image recognition”, the paper was written by He Kaiming, Ren Shaoqing, Sun Jian and Zhang Xiangyu – all members of Microsoft Research Asia at the time.
When neural networks are made very deep, their performance can worsen because the learning signal gets weaker as it goes through more layers.
