What's An Important Paper? Take the JACS Challenge!

Here's a darn good question: how good are we at telling (when they're published) what scientific papers are important? We were talking around here the other day about famous work that had been rejected, and this is the less dramatic aspect of the same phenomenon.

At ScienceGeist, they're putting this to an empirical test. Given a ten-year-old issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society, could a person predict which papers in it have had the most impact? Well, here's the issue, and here's the survey to take after you've looked it over. Please don't cheat by looking up citation counts or the like - approach this one cold and use your mighty scientific intuition. I'll be putting my own answers in later this morning. I look forward to seeing the results!

Source: In the Pipeline - September 23, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: The Scientific Literature Source Type: blogs