Is String Theory Still King? A Look at the Top Cited Papers in Particle Physics

[marcus]

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/2006topcites.html

great going

 

[josh1]

It's worth mentioning that woit finds these results depressing.

 

[marcus]

Peter's count makes it official, we have 3 winners of the forecast poll
Chronos, Gokul, and notevenwrong

https://www.physicsforums.com/poll.php?do=showresults&pollid=917

These three guessed that there would be exactly 3 string papers that appeared in the past 5 years (2002-2006) which would get 100+ cites in 2006.
And that's what Peter's list shows

the three papers are
Berenstein et al http://arxiv.org/hep-th/0202021 with 128

KKLT http://arxiv.org/hep-th/0301240 with 238

Susskind http://arxiv.org/hep-th/0302219 with 109

Here is the forecast poll thread with explanation of the question, and discussion:
https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=131433

I guess the way to put it in a nutshell is to recall that in year 2000 there were twenty-one recent stringy papers which got cited 100+ times in that year. By recent I mean appearing in the past five years (1996 - 2000).
Here's the link if anyone wants to check:
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/library/topcites/top40.2000.shtml

If you do the same count for 2006, then recent means (2002- 2006) and there were only three which made that mark.

My cordial thanks to Peter for having sifted thru the cites files to get final numbers for 2006. Spires has tended to be less forthcoming and a bit tardy with its results.

 

[josh1]

These three guessed that there would be exactly 3 string papers that appeared in the past 5 years (2002-2006) which would get 100+ cites in 2006. And that's what Peter's list shows

What woit's list shows is that the view that string theory remains the only truly promising approach to physics beyond the standard model continues to prevail by a wide margin, the reason being that it is the only theory that includes all the properties that such a theory must have. However, it's good that there are some people willing to work on other ideas.

 

[Gokul43201]

Is this the second time I've gotten incredibly lucky on one of your polls?!

 

[josh1]

Is this the second time I've gotten incredibly lucky on one of your polls?!

Since it was just luck and no money was involved it doesn't count, the lesson here being that next time, you should lie.

 

[josh1]

These three guessed that there would be exactly 3 string papers that appeared in the past 5 years (2002-2006) which would get 100+ cites in 2006. And that's what Peter's list shows

NO! That is not what peter's list shows. The exact quotation is:

Overall, the list provides a very depressing view of the first six years of 21st century theoretical particle physics, with only eight post-2000 papers getting over 100 citations. These break up neatly into 4 hep-th string theory papers and 4 hep-ph phenomenology papers.

Thus his list pertains to all of particle physics, not just string theory, which, as peter's list shows, continues to utterly and completely dominate particle physics.