Classic articles published by American scientists (1900-2014): a bibliometric analysis

The present study reports US independent classic articles published by American scientists from 1900 to 2014. We examined those articles that had been cited at least 1000 times since publication to the end of 2014 using the Science Citation Index Expanded in the Web of Science (WoS). We also applied a bibliometric indicator, the Y-index, to assess the contributions of the authors of these articles. The results showed that 4909 classic articles were published between 1916 and 2013, and that the most productive categories from the WoS were multidisciplinary sciences, biochemistry and molecular biology, and general and internal medicine. Science published most of these articles, and the three most productive institutions were Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University. The physicist, Edward Witten was the most prolific author and an article written by the biochemist, Marion Bradford at University of Georgia in 1976 had the highest number of citations. In addition, the article by Perdew, Burke and Ernzerhof at Tulane University had the highest number of citations in 2014.