The number of citations is commonly used to measure the impact of a scientific paper. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Science Citation Index (SCI), the official website of Nature published a statistical analysis (Van Noorden R, Maher B, Nuzzo R. The top 100 papers. Nature, 2014, 514(7524): 550-3) that tallied the citation counts of all research papers to date. Three papers have been cited more than 100,000 times, far surpassing others. These three papers fall within the biotechnology field, which dominates the list of the most-cited articles, claiming seven spots among the top ten. Western Blot (WB) techniques alone account for four of these positions, ranking 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 6th respectively. The Lowry protein quantification method, published in 1951, leads the list, followed closely by the Bradford protein quantification method in third place. Sandwiched between them is the Laemmli buffer system used for protein electrophoresis. Ranking sixth is the seminal paper that introduced the most widely used method of protein blotting, closely resembling the current laboratory practice for protein immunoblotting
The following is a list of the top ten most-cited papers published in Nature：
- Protein measurement with the Folin phenol reagent(1951), academic citations: 305,148；
- Cleavage of structural proteins during the assembly of the head of the bacteriophage T4(1970), academic citations: 213,005；
- A rapid and sensitive method for the quantitation of microgram quantities of protein utilizing the principle of protein-dye binding(1976), academic citations: 155,530；
- DNA sequencing with chain-terminating inhibitors(1977), academic citations: 65,335；
- Singl-step method of RNA isolation by acid guanidinium thiocyanate-phenol-chloroform extraction(1987), academic citations: 60,397；
- Electrophoretic transfer of proteins from polyacrylamide gels to nitrocellulose sheets: procedure and some applications(1979), academic citations: 53,349；
- Development of the Colle-Salvetti correlation-energy formula into a functional of the electron density(1988), academic citations: 46,702；
- Density-functional thermochemistry. lll. The role of exact exchange(1993)，academic citations: 46,145；
- A simple method for the isolation and purification of total lipides from animal tissues(1957), academic citations: 45,131；
- CLUSTAL W: improving the sensitivity of progressive multiple sequence alignment through sequence weighting,position-sequence alignment through sequence weighting,position-specific gap penalties and weight matrix choice(1994), academic citations: 40,289。
