Citation Classics Is Back

Starting in 1977, Eugene Garfield's Citation Classics series at ISI invited the authors of highly cited papers to write short commentaries on their own work. Over 15 years, more than 4,000 scientists told the stories behind their most influential publications: the failed experiments, the lucky breaks, the collaborators who made the difference. It was one of the most human things ever done with citation data.

Then it stopped.

We're bringing it back at citationclassics.com.

Why now?

Citations have gotten smarter since Garfield's day. Traditional citation counts treat every citation the same, whether a paper is being praised, challenged, or merely name-checked in an introduction. At Scite, we've built Smart Citations that classify how a paper is cited: as supporting, contrasting, or mentioning evidence. We've extracted and analyzed over 1.6 billion citation statements.

This changes what we can see. A paper with 500 citations is no longer a flat list but a conversation between researchers across time.

What's different this time

The original series asked one question: what's the story behind this highly cited paper? We're asking that and more. With Smart Citations, we can surface papers that have been supported as well as those that have sparked real scientific debate, not just papers that racked up counts. We can ask authors not only how their work came to be, but how they feel about the ways it's been supported, challenged, and reinterpreted over the years.

Each essay pairs the author's personal narrative with a Smart Citation analysis of their paper. Readers get the human story alongside the data on how the scientific community engaged with the work. The result is something richer than either piece alone: context that no metric can capture, combined with evidence that no anecdote can provide.

The first essay

Our first essay is live now at citationclassics.com. We'll be publishing new essays regularly, each one exploring a different landmark paper through the eyes of its author and through the lens of how it was cited.

If you're a researcher whose work has had a significant citation life, or if you know someone whose paper has an interesting story, we'd love to hear from you.

Numbers tell you a paper mattered. Smart Citations tell you how. The authors tell you the backstory. Citation Classics brings all three together.