Have Your Read the Top Cited Articles?

The Journal Citation Report—2000 Science Edition points to the top 20 cited articles from the Journal of Solid-State Circuits since JSSC’s inception. All have over 100 citations, that is, over 100 other peer-reviewed articles by authors who knew to cite these documents fundamental to their work. The Journal is ranked 17 out of 203 scientific journals for frequency of citations, ranking higher than 13 journals that published more articles in 2002. Two-thirds of the most frequently cited JSSC articles were published prior to 1980. Although it may be true that it takes time to grow a quantity of citations, half of most citations of JSSC articles are made in the initial seven years after they first appear. Robert Dennard, lead author of the most frequently cited paper, suggests that most progress in the last twenty years consists of incremental advances, and seminal breakthroughs are less characteristic of the field than in the 70s and early 80s.

Eight of the papers were developed from presentations originally made at conferences: the 1988 article by Krummenacher and Loehl was developed from an ESSCIRC Conference, the six articles published in December were developed from ISSCC presentations, and Dennard’s article was an outgrowth of a presentation originally made at IEDM.

Dennard’s article on MOS scaling, published in 1974, has been cited about five times more often than most of the other top twenty and three times more often the second most frequently cited article, a paper on a low-power CMOS digital design by Anantha Chandrakasan et al. See the attached article for more comments from Dennard, explaining the genesis and impact of his paper, now almost thirty years old. Look for more interviews with top-cited authors in future issues of the SSCS Newsletter.