The third place in the ranking of the top 100 most high-profile scientific papers in 2016 took work with the results of the observation of gravitational waves. Physical research on physics very rarely attracts media attention, reaching 3rd place in citation is the rarest event. But the fourth place was taken by another work on astrophysics with evidence of the existence of Nibiru, the ninth planet of the solar system. So this year was truly unique to physics.

Each year, the British company Altmetric ranks the Altmetric Top 100 with a list of scientific papers that have received the most public attention this year. The company keeps track of the number of news articles citing scientific work, echoing on social networks, the number of mentions on Wikipedia, StackOverflow, Faculty1000, and some other parameters with a certain weight of each .

The top 100 at the end of 2016 was very unusual.

The most surprising thing about this ranking is who ranked first. This is a scientific paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), whose only author is Barack Obama.
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The scientific article by Barack Obama on the reform of the American health care system received the maximum appreciation of the attention of the scientific community, the media and the Altmetric Top 100 society. This is the first ever scientific work written by the current US president. In this article, the author analyzes the effect of the implementation of the Affordable Care Act and recommends priorities for further health care reform for future governments. Obama's scientific article ahead of the historical discovery of gravitational waves, the study of the Zika virus, the discovery of the ninth planet of the solar system, and even a scandalous article about how corporations hid scientific evidence of the harm of sugar to the cardiovascular system.

The Altmetric data mining system this year processed 17 million references to 2.7 million scientific articles.

The outgoing year has become unique in some other respects. Above mentioned the great success of physics, which made its way to the 3rd and 4th place in the ranking. This is very rare, because the general public is rarely so interested in the natural sciences. Only six works on physics got into the overall ranking of the top 100.



Another significant achievement of 2016 is a large number of scientific publications published in the public domain, preprints and not reviewed. They also received more attention than usual.

“For the first time, we see biology preprints on the top 100 list,” says Euan Adie, founder of Altmetric. In particular, this scientific article from the bioRxiv preprint site ranked 21st, and the article from Peerj ranked 28th.

However, it should be noted that the article in the 21st place with an analysis of studies on the carcinogenic effect of the radio frequency radiation of mobile phones was at the same time one of the most controversial and criticized scientific articles of this year. It is not surprising that it did not pass the peer-review and was published in the preprint.

30 out of 100 works of the current rating are in the public domain, and for 17 more works, scientific publishers do not voluntarily charge (free-to-reed). Total for the "toll wall" were only 53% of the most cited sciences. This is another victory of free science.



Tabular data with statistics and complete data of scientific articles for the ranking of the top 100 are published on this page .

Top 10

1. United States Health Care Reform: Progress to Date and Next Steps (JAMA)
2. Medical error - the third leading cause of death in the US (British Medical Journal) , an article on Geektimes: "The mistakes of doctors - the third most common cause of death in the United States "
3. Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger (Physical Review Letters) , on Geektimes: " Gravitational waves are registered for the first time: now officially "
4. Evidence for a Distant Giant Planet in the Solar System (The Astronomical Journal) , " New indirect signs of the ninth planet of the Solar System found "
5. Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research (A JAMA Internal Medicine) , “ How the sugar industry paid for Harvard's research on the harm of fat ”
6. Zika Virus and Birth Defects - Reviewing the Evidence for Causality (New England Journal of Medicine)
7. The Association Between Income and Life Expectancy in the United States, 2001-2014 (JAMA)
8. IDEA Randomized Clinical Trial (JAMA)
9. Habré article: “ AlphaGo on fingers ”
10. " The generations of people who have not seen the Milky Way have grown up "

Unfortunately, three of the most cited scientific papers of 2016 eluded the attention of Geektimes audience:

• study of the effect of Zika virus on neonatal defects;
• the relationship of a person’s income with his life expectancy;
• the impact of wearable electronics and lifestyle on long-term weight loss.

But in general, the list of the most cited scientific works in the media does not always correlate with their scientific importance, which is evident even from number 1 in the Top 100 list. The real importance of the work is determined by the citation index in other scientific papers. This index is not formed instantly, as in the media, but accumulates over the years and decades - as new and new scientific papers are released.

Only in ten to twenty years we will understand that in 2016 something really important was discovered. And we did not notice.