An article in Nature Index by Bec Crew has reviewed the annual ranking by Google Scholar of the most influential papers published in 2020. It is remarkable that research in Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially computer vision which is a crucial element in self-driving cars and surveillance, accounts for a disproportionate number of the most highly cited papers. There is a growing awareness in the EU and the USA of the significance of these fields that has been realised in a substantial improvement in research funding. Genetics papers have also received a large number of citations.
The 2020 Google Scholar Metrics ranking, includes articles published between 2015 and 2019 and noted in Google Scholar up to June 2020. The journal with the largest number of citations is Nature.
The most influential paper in 2020, receiving 49,301 citations in 2020, was ‘Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition’, published in Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, was written by a Microsoft group.
Other outstanding papers were published in Nature, the International Conference on Learning Representations, Neural Information Processing Systems, Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and Nucleic Acids Research,
A major role in the rapid diffusion of research and the exponential growth of citations was played by annual conferences with thousands of international participants, and the development of open-source software.
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