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Most cited papers in Life Sciences

What are the most cited papers in Life Sciences?

The most cited paper in Life Sciences is "PROTEIN MEASUREMENT WITH THE FOLIN PHENOL REAGENT" (OliverH. Lowry, NiraJ. Rosebrough, A. Lewis Farr et al., 1951), with 319,095 citations. Next come "Cleavage of Structural Proteins during the Assembly of the Head of Bacteriophage T4" (252,153) and "A Rapid and Sensitive Method for the Quantitation of Microgram Quantities of Protein Utilizing the Principle of Protein-Dye Binding" (225,381).

Showing 50 of 100 papers. Every paper with more than 24,756 citations is listed.

Most cited papers, sortable by citations and release date
#Paper
1 PROTEIN MEASUREMENT WITH THE FOLIN PHENOL REAGENT OliverH. Lowry, NiraJ. Rosebrough, A. Lewis Farr et al. · Journal of Biological Chemistry Open access Nov 1951 319,095
2 Cleavage of Structural Proteins during the Assembly of the Head of Bacteriophage T4 Ulrich K. Laemmli · Nature Open access Aug 1970 252,153
3 A Rapid and Sensitive Method for the Quantitation of Microgram Quantities of Protein Utilizing the Principle of Protein-Dye Binding Mark A. Bradford · Analytical Biochemistry 7 May 1976 225,381
4 A rapid and sensitive method for the quantitation of microgram quantities of protein utilizing the principle of protein-dye binding Marion M. Bradford · Analytical Biochemistry May 1976 212,905
5 Analysis of Relative Gene Expression Data Using Real-Time Quantitative PCR and the 2−ΔΔCT Method Kenneth J. Livak, Thomas D. Schmittgen · Methods Dec 2001 184,956
6 Moderated estimation of fold change and dispersion for RNA-seq data with DESeq2 Michael I. Love, Wolfgang K. Huber, Simon Anders · Genome biology Open access 5 Dec 2014 104,335
7 Basic local alignment search tool Stephen F. Altschul, Warren R. Gish, Webb Miller et al. · Journal of Molecular Biology Oct 1990 95,803
8 U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation Olaf Ronneberger, Philipp F. Fischer, Thomas Brox · Lecture notes in computer science Conference paperOpen access 2015 92,751
9 A short history of SHELX George M. Sheldrick · Acta Crystallographica Section A Foundations of Crystallography Open access 21 Dec 2007 87,903
10 Molecular cloning: A laboratory manual Prescott L. Deininger · Analytical Biochemistry Apr 1990 86,239
11 Gapped BLAST and PSI-BLAST: a new generation of protein database search programs Stephen F. Altschul · Nucleic Acids Research Open access Sep 1997 75,032
12 Fiji: an open-source platform for biological-image analysis Johannes Schindelin, Ignacio Arganda‐Carreras, Erwin Frise et al. · Nature Methods Open access 28 Jun 2012 73,171
13 Trimmomatic: a flexible trimmer for Illumina sequence data Anthony Bolger, Marc Lohse, Björn Usadel · Bioinformatics Open access Apr 2014 71,819
14 DNA sequencing with chain-terminating inhibitors Frederick Sanger, S. Nicklen, Alan R. Coulson · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Open access Dec 1977 69,512
15 The Sequence Alignment/Map format and SAMtools Heng Li, Bob Handsaker, Alec Wysoker et al. · Bioinformatics Open access 8 Jun 2009 69,061
16 VMD: Visual molecular dynamics William F Humphrey Jr, Andrew Dalke, Klaus J. Schulten · Journal of Molecular Graphics Feb 1996 68,537
17 A Revised Medium for Rapid Growth and Bio Assays with Tobacco Tissue Cultures Toshio Murashige, Folke Skoog · Physiologia Plantarum Jul 1962 67,944
18 Hallmarks of Cancer: The Next Generation Douglas Hanahan, Robert A. Weinberg · Cell Open access Mar 2011 67,836
19 NIH Image to ImageJ: 25 years of image analysis Caroline A Schneider, Wayne S. Rasband, Kevin W. Eliceiri · Nature Methods Open access 28 Jun 2012 67,169
20 Mutation of the mouse klotho gene leads to a syndrome resembling ageing. M Kuro-o, Y Matsumura, H Aizawa et al. · PubMed 6 Nov 1997 66,570
21 CLUSTAL W: improving the sensitivity of progressive multiple sequence alignment through sequence weighting, position-specific gap penalties and weight matrix choice Julie Thompson, Desmond G. Higgins, Toby J. Gibson · Nucleic Acids Research Open access 1994 65,356
22 Fast and accurate short read alignment with Burrows–Wheeler transform Heng Li, Richard M. Durbin · Bioinformatics Open access 18 May 2009 63,989
23 Single-Step Method of RNA Isolation by Acid Guanidinium Thiocyanate–Phenol–Chloroform Extraction P CHOMZYNSKI · Analytical Biochemistry Apr 1987 63,261
24 Fast gapped-read alignment with Bowtie 2 Ben Langmead, Steven L. Salzberg · Nature Methods Open access 4 Mar 2012 62,825
25 The neighbor-joining method: a new method for reconstructing phylogenetic trees. Naruya Saitou, M Nei · Molecular Biology and Evolution Open access Jul 1987 60,643
26 Gene set enrichment analysis: A knowledge-based approach for interpreting genome-wide expression profiles Aravind N. Subramanian, Pablo Tamayo, Vamsi Krishna Mootha et al. · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Open access 30 Sep 2005 58,060
27 STAR: ultrafast universal RNA-seq aligner Alexander Yu. Dobin, Carrie Davis, Felix Schlesinger et al. · Bioinformatics Open access 25 Oct 2012 58,026
28 Rapid colorimetric assay for cellular growth and survival: Application to proliferation and cytotoxicity assays Tim R. Mosmann · Journal of Immunological Methods Dec 1983 56,216
29 Cytoscape: A Software Environment for Integrated Models of Biomolecular Interaction Networks Paul T. Shannon, Andrew Markiel, Owen W. Ozier et al. · Genome Research Open access Nov 2003 55,788
30 Research electronic data capture (REDCap)—A metadata-driven methodology and workflow process for providing translational research informatics support Paul A. Harris, ROBERT J. TAYLOR, Robert J. Thielke et al. · Journal of Biomedical Informatics Open access Oct 2008 53,362
31 Clinical features of patients infected with 2019 novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China Chaolin Huang et al. · The Lancet Open access 24 Jan 2020 52,028
32 MAFFT Multiple Sequence Alignment Software Version 7: Improvements in Performance and Usability Kazutaka Katoh, Daron M. Standley · Molecular Biology and Evolution Open access 16 Jan 2013 50,020
33 UCSF Chimera—A visualization system for exploratory research and analysis Eric F. Pettersen, Thomas D. Goddard, Conrad C. Huang et al. · Journal of Computational Chemistry Jul 2004 48,801
34 MEGA6: Molecular Evolutionary Genetics Analysis Version 6.0 Koichiro Tamura, Glen Stecher, Daniel S. Peterson et al. · Molecular Biology and Evolution Open access 16 Oct 2013 48,154
35 Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold John Jumper et al. · Nature Open access 15 Jul 2021 47,486
36 Short-Term Effects of Nose-Only Cigarette Smoke Exposure on Glutathione Redox Homeostasis, Cytochrome P450 1A1/2 and Respiratory Enzyme Activities in Mice Tissues Haider Raza, Annie John, Abderrahim Nemmar · Cellular Physiology and Biochemistry Open access 2013 47,289
37 MUSCLE: multiple sequence alignment with high accuracy and high throughput R. C. Edgar · Nucleic Acids Research Open access 8 Mar 2004 47,285
38 Single-step method of RNA isolation by acid guanidinium thiocyanate-phenol-chloroform extraction Piotr Chomczyński, Nicoletta Sacchi · Analytical Biochemistry Apr 1987 47,055
39 MEGA7: Molecular Evolutionary Genetics Analysis Version 7.0 for Bigger Datasets Sudhir Kumar, Glen Stecher, Koichiro Tamura · Molecular Biology and Evolution Open access 22 Mar 2016 46,273
40 edgeR : a Bioconductor package for differential expression analysis of digital gene expression data Mark D. Robinson, Davis James McCarthy, Gordon K. Smyth · Bioinformatics Open access 11 Nov 2009 45,449
41 Gene Ontology: tool for the unification of biology Michael Ashburner, Catherine A. Ball, Judith A. Blake et al. · Nature Genetics Open access May 2000 45,425
42 limma powers differential expression analyses for RNA-sequencing and microarray studies Matthew E. Ritchie, Belinda Phipson, Di Wu et al. · Nucleic Acids Research Open access 20 Jan 2015 44,530
43 Collective dynamics of ‘small-world’ networks Duncan J. Watts, Steven H. Strogatz · Nature Jun 1998 43,707
44 A power primer. Jacob Cohen · Psychological Bulletin 1992 42,833
45 CONFIDENCE LIMITS ON PHYLOGENIES: AN APPROACH USING THE BOOTSTRAP Joseph Felsenstein · Evolution Open access Jul 1985 41,763
46 The Protein Data Bank Helen Miriam Berman · Nucleic Acids Research Open access 2000 40,564
47 MEGA5: Molecular Evolutionary Genetics Analysis Using Maximum Likelihood, Evolutionary Distance, and Maximum Parsimony Methods Koichiro Tamura, Daniel Gunnar Peterson, Nora Peterson et al. · Molecular Biology and Evolution Open access 4 May 2011 40,453
48 KEGG: Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes Minoru I. Kanehisa · Nucleic Acids Research Open access 2000 40,289
49 SciPy 1.0: fundamental algorithms for scientific computing in Python Pauli Virtanen et al. · Nature Methods Open access112 authors 3 Feb 2020 40,161
50 clusterProfiler: an R Package for Comparing Biological Themes Among Gene Clusters Guangchuang Yu, Li-Gen Wang, Yanyan Han et al. · OMICS A Journal of Integrative Biology Open access 28 Mar 2012 39,704

Citations are OpenAlex's own counts, from its 2026-09-23 snapshot, so the ranking can differ from Google Scholar or Web of Science. A paper is listed for a field when OpenAlex files it under one of the field's topics; retracted papers and papers whose citation count cannot be traced to citing works are left out, and a preprint and the article it became are shown once. Release dates are OpenAlex's: where a source gave only a month or a year, that is what is shown. How the lists are chosen.