
Classic Papers: Articles That Have Stood the Test of Time - jasim
https://scholar.googleblog.com/2017/06/classic-papers-articles-that-have-stood.html
======
drfuchs
They completely missed, with 1800+ citations, the winner of the “Theory of
Cryptography Conference (TCC) 2016 _Test of Time award_ ”: “Calibrating Noise
to Sensitivity in Private Data Analysis” by Cynthia Dwork, Frank McSherry,
Kobbi Nissim, and Adam Smith. Oh, it also just won the 2017 Gödel Prize; it
really ought to be at the top of both the “Theoretical Computer Science” and
“Computer Security and Cryptography” lists.

Worse still, with ~3000 citations, Dwork’s “Differential Privacy” (ICALP (2)
2006: 1-12), should rank even higher in the Theoretical Computer Science list.
But Google Scholar has completely lost track of that foundational paper; it’s
got it all confused with a completely different paper, Dwork’s 2008
“Differential Privacy: A Survey of Results”. Note that this also means that
anybody searching for the general topic “differential privacy” on Google
Scholar will not get to see the most-cited paper about it!
[https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-
content/uploads/...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-
content/uploads/2016/02/dwork.pdf)

Disclaimer: Dwork and I have been seen together, for 24 years.

~~~
jventura
From the article: "This release of classic papers consists of articles that
were published in 2006..". Your second one could be there (I haven't looked
for it), but you're mentioning some problems with the article, maybe it's
that..

~~~
drfuchs
They were both published in 2006, so not sure what you're getting at.

Google Scholar and Sean Henderson are promulgating a false historical record,
and there seems to be no way to inform them so that they may correct
themselves, other than whining here on HN and hoping they notice. Anybody have
any other suggestions?

~~~
frankmcsherry
[https://support.google.com/scholar/contact/general](https://support.google.com/scholar/contact/general)

~~~
drfuchs
For the record: Re-confirmed that Google Scholar's "support" page is useless.
It simply replies with an email indicating that while you can go ahead and
complain, they're not going to bother to do anything to fix their algorithm no
matter how wrong-headed it is, so tough luck for you and the rest of the
unsuspecting, misinformed, current and future universe. Same result as from
the previous 3 tries to correct the record. And same as with recent attempts
to contact them via email and even USPS snail-mail.

They don't even seem bothered that this in turn leads to Google's own data-
miners publishing false results based on Google Scholar's error-filled data;
Sean Henderson and Anurag Acharya both have their names on the erroneous blog
entry, and still it remains uncorrected. One might think that they would't
want their names associated with false information, and messing up the true
historical record.

Anyway, congratulations on being presented with ACM SIGACT's 2017 Gödel Prize
"for the invention of Differential Privacy" in the "Calibrating Noise to
Sensitivity in Private Data Analysis" paper at last week's ACM Symposium on
Theory of Computing (STOC). Too bad Google Scholar seems intent on hiding it.
Maybe all the search-terms I've semi-awkwardly included here will help future
(re)searchers find it, as well as Dwork's "Differential Privacy" ICALP 2006.

------
nyrulez
This has left me scratching my head - why just 2006 ? Having just one year of
publications and labeling them "Classic Papers" is pretty misleading as the
term is used to indicate a wide gamut of publications over a much longer
period of time. It should be just called "Top papers or research from 2006".
Unless this expands to at least cover a decade, it shouldn't be labeled as
such.

This almost sounds like collecting my most liked pics from 2006 on Facebook
and creating an album "Best moments of my life".

Do they not have data before 2006 ?

~~~
a3n
> This has left me scratching my head - why just 2006 ?

As they said in the post, they're measuring cites 10 years after. It's 2017. I
imagine 2006 is their "inaugural year."

~~~
RhysU
Measuring citations by year Y+10 for publication year Y could be run for all
historical years pretty easily.

------
diggan
Nice list, but as many other said, seems to only be for 2006.

For more papers, there is a nice list here:
[http://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards.html](http://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards.html)
not limited to 2006

There is a bunch more places to get papers listed here too:
[https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love#other-
good-...](https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love#other-good-places-
to-find-papers)

------
bokertov
Is the author JH He of the #1 paper in computational mathematics a self citing
spammer?

[https://www.google.com/amp/s/selfcitation.wordpress.com/2011...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/selfcitation.wordpress.com/2011/11/01/self-
citation-expert-ji-huan-he-and-nelson-tansu/amp/)

------
whynotqat
As one might guess, there is a lot wrong with this list even within there
stated goals. My examples are drawn from mathematics, since that's what I
know. They appear to use the journal to classify category, which doesn't work
very well since many of the best results are published in general journals.
Additionally, since citation counts vary so widely between sub-fields, there
is a strong pull towards selecting misclassified work from higher-citation
fields. For example the paper "High-dimensional centrally symmetric polytopes
with neighborliness proportional to dimension" is listed in geometry but
belongs elsewhere, and there are no probability papers in the category
"Probability and Statistics with Applications". Also, the "Pure & Applied"
category is meaningless. That list seems to be the most cited papers from five
arbitrary journals. I guess it's a reminder that these problems are hard to
automate, and that your work doesn't have to be perfect to share.

~~~
glup
Cognitive Science suffers from the same problem of misclassifications from
higher-citation fields (neuroscience).

Agreed that projects don't have to be perfect but it does have to have _some_
functionality to ship... I don't see how I could use this could help me
construct a course reading list or to improve my understanding of my academic
field, given the problems.

~~~
phreeza
There wasn't even a neuroscience category on the page, only neurology and
neurosurgery.

------
dev_tty01
Should be labeled "Top cited papers of 2006" or something similar. Calling
this collection "Classic Papers" is misleading at best.

~~~
a3n
No, it's an exactly accurate name for their feature. For which they have only
yet released the 2006 edition.

------
logicallee
Out of curiosity, does anyone have any examples of scientific books (or
papers) that are the exact opposite: influential or famous at the time but
completely and utterly destroyed by the test of time. Like, that seem silly to
us in how completely and utterly wrong they turned out to be in their every
single conclusion.

I'm thinking about research versions of Lord Kevin's favorite edict: "Heavier
than air flying machines impossible" or the patent person (examiner? head of
patent office?) who in the nineteenth century said everything that can be
invented has been invented.

~~~
Houshalter
Sure fields of research go obsolete all the time. E.g. much of the computer
vision stuff from 2006 is basically dead now. If you go further back, a lot of
early AI research was exciting at the time, but is entirely forgotten about
now.

~~~
mindcrime
_If you go further back, a lot of early AI research was exciting at the time,
but is entirely forgotten about now._

Interesting that you would use that example. I suspect, although I can't
_prove_ , that this is largely a mistake. Or maybe not so much a _mistake_ as
a choice that will wind up being revisited. That is, I think there is still a
lot of "meat on the bone" for many of the AI techniques that were being
explored in the 70's and 80's, and we will see another round of things
suddenly coming back into favor at some point. It's happened before...
remember when ANN's were completely out of vogue, and the computing power and
data availability caused a sudden resurgence in interest in those? I would not
be surprised to see similar things happening w/r/t various aspects of GOFAI.

More likely, I think we'll see additional integration / hybridization of
probabilistic / pattern matching systems (using ANN's / Deep Learning / etc.)
_and_ symbolic processing and automated reasoning.

'course, I might be totally wrong, but that's my feeling ATM.

------
glup
Methodology is not described and the resulting collections are of notably poor
quality. Given Google's privileged position in knowledge production I wish
they would be far more careful in cases like this.

------
ivan_ah
For everyone disappointed to see papers only from 2006, here is a consolation
prize. _Creating a Computer Science Canon: a Course of “Classic” Readings in
Computer Science_ :
[http://l3d.cs.colorado.edu/~ctg/pubs/sigcsecanon.pdf](http://l3d.cs.colorado.edu/~ctg/pubs/sigcsecanon.pdf)
(CS only, date range = [1806:2006])

------
kensai
This is also very interesting: the AAAI Classic Paper Award.

The AAAI Classic Paper award honors the author(s) of paper(s) deemed most
influential, chosen from a specific conference year. Each year, the time
period considered will advance by one year.

Papers will be judged on the basis of impact, for example:

    
    
        Started a new research (sub)area
        Led to important applications
        Answered a long-standing question/issue or clarified what had been murky
        Made a major advance that figures in the history of the subarea
        Has been picked up as important and used by other areas within (or outside of) AI
        Has been very heavily cited
    

[https://aaai.org/Awards/classic.php](https://aaai.org/Awards/classic.php)

------
joatmon-snoo
Noticeably missing: Gray and Lamport's "Consensus on Transaction Commit"

~~~
spatulon
That paper appears to have been published in 2004, not 2006.

~~~
joatmon-snoo
To arXiv in '04, but to ACM in '06.

------
idlewords
In the Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies section, five of the ten cited
papers are about Turkey. Another is about representation of Islam in the
Australian media.

This... doesn't seem like a very representative selection of 'timeless'
papers.

------
nickpsecurity
The security examples were weak. Far more influential were the Ware or
Anderson reports, MULTICS security evaluation, anything describing Orange
Book-style systematic assurance of whole systems, at least one on capability-
security or by Butler Lampson (did access control too), something on
monitoring/logging, something on static analysis, CompCert or Coq, and so on.

Things that had a major impact on the problems they focused on which many
other papers doing something similar built on or constantly referenced. I'm
skeptical of citations in general since those who chase them usually do a high
number of quotable papers in whatever fad is popular instead of hard, deep,
and critical work. Those I listed are the latter with who knows what
citations. The collection is probably still nice for finding neat ideas or
just learning in general.

------
nadim
Classic Albums: 5 Mics in the Source

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Source#The_Source.27s_Five...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Source#The_Source.27s_Five-
Mic_albums)

------
Aardappel
No "programming language design and implementation" category?

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Looks like those would be under "Software systems."

~~~
Aardappel
Seems like at best 1 out of 10 in that category qualifies.. but yes, this is
just 2006, so hard to tell.

~~~
nickpsecurity
Should be easy. Just look for ALGOL, LISP, Pascal (or Wirth), BCPL/C, ML,
Haskell, Prolog, and META II. They should all be there since tons of CompSci
work and many commercial products came from these. About six also establish a
new or altered paradigm of programming, too. If it doesn't have most of them,
then the list is bullshit. If it does, then it's solid.

Note: They all came _way_ before 2006, too. Should've been easy for authors to
find. :)

------
hkon
For computer science, I find most useful papers are from before 1990. Looking
forward to that being included.

------
threepipeproblm
Ironically, you have to copy, paste and Google the titles of most of these to
find downloadable versions.

~~~
blt
sci-hub.cc can help with those that don't show a PDF in the Google results.

~~~
threepipeproblm
I hope sci-hub and libgen can stay afloat. sci-hub.ac is also up atm. "to
remove all barriers in the way of science" \-- be advised it's not necessarily
legal.

------
husamia
all the articles were only published in 2006! I tried to change the data to
2017 but it didn't work

------
teddyh
Flagged for misleading headline.

------
qrbLPHiKpiux
A lot has happened in my profession since 2006...

~~~
jldugger
But it wouldn't necessarily be a 'classic'.

The point of the exercise is to find papers that are widely considered
valuable, especially to other researchers. To do this, they're using citation
counts.

There's obviously a number of problems with citations, including self-cites,
negative citations ("Alice & Bob '06 shook the community when they found
things, but our better, larger study finds no evidence of any effect"), and
such. But it makes sense for a company built upon citation rank indexing to
rely on such methods =)

------
seasonalgrit
"a collection of highly-cited papers"

no, a collection of titles. a collection of papers would be very useful; these
are just links, e.g., to paywalled sites.

