A news feature in the April 15, 2025 edition of Nature discusses highly cited papers. One Professor Burke co-authored in 1996 continues to be at the top of the list: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.77.3865
From the 4/15/25 Nature articles:
Materials high
"Remarkably, another research paper written nearly three decades ago was the fourth most referenced work in papers published in 2023. In 1996, three researchers at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, published a clever, fast approximation that could be used in software to help researchers to calculate the interactions of electrons in materials, as a way to understand the materials’ properties.
“The citations just grew and grew and grew,” says physicist Kieron Burke, who co-authored the article with physicists John Perdew and Matthias Ernzerhof. In fact, one-quarter of the paper’s total citations were garnered in the past two years, according to the Dimensions research database, and it is also the fourth most-cited paper of all time (see ‘These are the most-cited research papers of all time’). These are the most-cited research papers of all time
In the past decade, says Burke, who is now at the University of California, Irvine, universities and companies all over the world have been investing in ways to explore new advanced materials — and that’s led to a surge in use of the algorithms involved. “These electronic-structure calculations are key to the future of materials design,” he says. The study is one of many in the field of density functional theory (DFT), a way of simplifying the equations of quantum mechanics when applied to molecules and materials. Another DFT paper5, also published in 1996, is the ninth most cited in 2023 and eighth of all time.
Burke doubts many researchers are reading the original papers — but thinks that a culture has built up of citing key DFT source methods. That’s in part, he thinks, because there are several competing approximation algorithms in the field, so it is unusually important to be specific about the method used."