Subfield · Ecology
Most cited papers in Ecology
What are the most cited papers in Ecology?
The most cited paper in Ecology is "Cleavage of Structural Proteins during the Assembly of the Head of Bacteriophage T4" (Ulrich K. Laemmli, 1970), with 252,153 citations. Next come "DNA sequencing with chain-terminating inhibitors" (69,512) and "MEGA7: Molecular Evolutionary Genetics Analysis Version 7.0 for Bigger Datasets" (46,273).
Showing 50 of 100 papers. Every paper with more than 6,479 citations is listed.
| # | Paper | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cleavage of Structural Proteins during the Assembly of the Head of Bacteriophage T4 Ulrich K. Laemmli · Nature | Aug 1970 | 252,153 |
| 2 | DNA sequencing with chain-terminating inhibitors Frederick Sanger, S. Nicklen, Alan R. Coulson · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences | Dec 1977 | 69,512 |
| 3 | MEGA7: Molecular Evolutionary Genetics Analysis Version 7.0 for Bigger Datasets Sudhir Kumar, Glen Stecher, Koichiro Tamura · Molecular Biology and Evolution | 22 Mar 2016 | 46,273 |
| 4 | QIIME allows analysis of high-throughput community sequencing data J. Gregory Caporaso et al. · Nature Methods | 11 Apr 2010 | 36,341 |
| 5 | The SILVA ribosomal RNA gene database project: improved data processing and web-based tools Christian Quast, Elmar Pruesse, Pelin Yilmaz et al. · Nucleic Acids Research | 27 Nov 2012 | 35,094 |
| 6 | Inference of Population Structure Using Multilocus Genotype Data Jonathan K. Pritchard, Matthew Stephens, Peter Donnelly · Genetics | Jun 2000 | 34,685 |
| 7 | Biodiversity hotspots for conservation priorities Norman Myers, Russell A. Mittermeier, Cristina Goettsch Mittermeier et al. · Nature | Feb 2000 | 31,783 |
| 8 | SPAdes: A New Genome Assembly Algorithm and Its Applications to Single-Cell Sequencing Anton Bankevich, Sergey Nurk, Dmitry Antipov et al. · Journal of Computational Biology | 16 Apr 2012 | 27,967 |
| 9 | Introducing mothur: Open-Source, Platform-Independent, Community-Supported Software for Describing and Comparing Microbial Communities Patrick D. Schloss, Sarah L. Westcott, Thomas Ryabin et al. · Applied and Environmental Microbiology | 3 Oct 2009 | 22,073 |
| 10 | Naive Bayesian Classifier for Rapid Assignment of rRNA Sequences into the New Bacterial Taxonomy Qiong Wang, George M Garrity, James M. Tiedje et al. · Applied and Environmental Microbiology | 22 Jun 2007 | 20,801 |
| 11 | Maximum entropy modeling of species geographic distributions Steven J. Phillips, Robert P. Anderson, Robert E. Schapire · Ecological Modelling | 18 Jul 2005 | 18,119 |
| 12 | WorldClim 2: new 1‐km spatial resolution climate surfaces for global land areas Stephen E. Fick, Robert J. Hijmans · International Journal of Climatology | 15 May 2017 | 17,637 |
| 13 | UPARSE: highly accurate OTU sequences from microbial amplicon reads R. C. Edgar · Nature Methods | 18 Aug 2013 | 17,573 |
| 14 | Fast, scalable generation of high‐quality protein multiple sequence alignments using Clustal Omega Fabian Sievers, Andreas Wilm, David Dineen et al. · Molecular Systems Biology | 11 Oct 2011 | 16,563 |
| 15 | FLASH: fast length adjustment of short reads to improve genome assemblies Tanja Magoč, Steven L. Salzberg · Bioinformatics | 7 Sep 2011 | 16,123 |
| 16 | UCHIME improves sensitivity and speed of chimera detection R. C. Edgar, Brian J. Haas, José Carlos Clemente et al. · Bioinformatics | 23 Jun 2011 | 15,726 |
| 17 | One-step inactivation of chromosomal genes in Escherichia coli K-12 using PCR products Kirill A. Datsenko, Barry L. Wanner · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences | 30 May 2000 | 15,367 |
| 18 | Improved M13 phage cloning vectors and host strains: nucleotide sequences of the M13mpl8 and pUC19 vectors Celeste Yanisch-Perron, Jeffrey Vieira, Joachim W. Messing · Gene | 1985 | 15,189 |
| 19 | Google Earth Engine: Planetary-scale geospatial analysis for everyone Noel Gorelick, M. Hancher, Mike Dixon et al. · Remote Sensing of Environment | 6 Jul 2017 | 15,009 |
| 20 | A rapid alkaline extraction procedure for screening recombinant plasmid DNA H. Chaim Birnboim, Janine Doly · Nucleic Acids Research | 24 Nov 1979 | 14,900 |
| 21 | Non‐parametric multivariate analyses of changes in community structure K.R. Clarke · Australian Journal of Ecology | Mar 1993 | 14,354 |
| 22 | trimAl: a tool for automated alignment trimming in large-scale phylogenetic analyses Salvador Capella-Gutiérrez, José M. Silla-Martínez, Toni Gabaldón · Bioinformatics | 8 Jun 2009 | 14,201 |
| 23 | Mfold web server for nucleic acid folding and hybridization prediction Michael Zuker · Nucleic Acids Research | 24 Jun 2003 | 13,707 |
| 24 | CheckM: assessing the quality of microbial genomes recovered from isolates, single cells, and metagenomes Donovan H. Parks, Michael Imelfort, Connor T. Skennerton et al. · Genome Research | 14 May 2015 | 13,397 |
| 25 | A Second Generation Force Field for the Simulation of Proteins, Nucleic Acids, and Organic Molecules Wendy D. Cornell, Piotr Cieplak, Christopher I. Bayly et al. · Journal of the American Chemical Society | May 1995 | 13,239 |
| 26 | AFLP: a new technique for DNA fingerprinting Pieter Vos, René C. J. Hogers, Marjo Bleeker et al. · Nucleic Acids Research | 1995 | 12,461 |
| 27 | Food Security: The Challenge of Feeding 9 Billion People H. Charles J. Godfray, John Rex Beddington, I. R. Crute et al. · Science | 28 Jan 2010 | 12,022 |
| 28 | Red and photographic infrared linear combinations for monitoring vegetation Compton J. Tucker · Remote Sensing of Environment | May 1979 | 11,851 |
| 29 | World Map of the Köppen-Geiger climate classification updated Markus Kottek, Jürgen Grieser, Christoph Beck et al. · Meteorologische Zeitschrift | 2 Jul 2006 | 11,611 |
| 30 | Profiling of complex microbial populations by denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis analysis of polymerase chain reaction-amplified genes coding for 16S rRNA Gerard Muyzer, Ellen C. de Waal, André Gerardus Uitterlinden · Applied and Environmental Microbiology | Mar 1993 | 11,519 |
| 31 | Greengenes, a Chimera-Checked 16S rRNA Gene Database and Workbench Compatible with ARB Todd Z. DeSantis, Philip Hugenholtz, Nis Elbrønd Larsen et al. · Applied and Environmental Microbiology | Jul 2006 | 11,348 |
| 32 | Collinearity: a review of methods to deal with it and a simulation study evaluating their performance Carsten F. Dormann, Jane Elith, Sven Bacher et al. · Ecography | 18 May 2012 | 11,040 |
| 33 | Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems Walter Churchill Willett et al. · The Lancet | 16 Jan 2019 | 10,973 |
| 34 | Abundances of the elements: Meteoritic and solar Edward Anders, N. Grevesse · Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta | 1989 | 10,547 |
| 35 | MEGAHIT: an ultra-fast single-node solution for large and complex metagenomics assembly via succinct de Bruijn graph Dinghua Li, Chi-Man Liu, Ruibang Luo et al. · Bioinformatics | 20 Jan 2015 | 10,529 |
| 36 | Systematic Evolution of Ligands by Exponential Enrichment: RNA Ligands to Bacteriophage T4 DNA Polymerase Craig Tuerk, Larry Gold · Science | 3 Aug 1990 | 10,507 |
| 37 | Global patterns of 16S rRNA diversity at a depth of millions of sequences per sample J. Gregory Caporaso, Christian L. Lauber, William A. Walters et al. · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences | 3 Jun 2010 | 10,238 |
| 38 | Phylogenies and the Comparative Method Joseph Felsenstein · The American Naturalist | 1985 | 10,187 |
| 39 | The biofilm matrix Hans‐Curt Flemming, Jost Wingender · Nature Reviews Microbiology | 2 Aug 2010 | 10,070 |
| 40 | Ecological responses to recent climate change Gian-Reto Walther, Eric Post, Peter Convey et al. · Nature | Mar 2002 | 10,060 |
| 41 | Overview of the radiometric and biophysical performance of the MODIS vegetation indices ALFREDO R. HUETE, Kamel Didan, Tomoaki Miura et al. · Remote Sensing of Environment | Nov 2002 | 9,991 |
| 42 | A new technique for the assay of infectivity of human adenovirus 5 DNA Frank L. Graham, A.J. van der Eb · Virology | Apr 1973 | 9,753 |
| 43 | Predictive functional profiling of microbial communities using 16S rRNA marker gene sequences Morgan G. I. Langille, Jesse Zaneveld, J. Gregory Caporaso et al. · Nature Biotechnology | 25 Aug 2013 | 9,519 |
| 44 | MUSCLE: a multiple sequence alignment method with reduced time and space complexity R. C. Edgar · BMC Bioinformatics | 19 Aug 2004 | 9,498 |
| 45 | Oxidants, oxidative stress and the biology of ageing Toren Finkel, Nikki J. Holbrook · Nature | Nov 2000 | 9,446 |
| 46 | De novo transcript sequence reconstruction from RNA-seq using the Trinity platform for reference generation and analysis Brian J. Haas et al. · Nature Protocols | 11 Jul 2013 | 9,312 |
| 47 | Ultra-high-throughput microbial community analysis on the Illumina HiSeq and MiSeq platforms J. Gregory Caporaso, Christian L. Lauber, William Anton Walters et al. · The ISME Journal | 8 Mar 2012 | 9,285 |
| 48 | Evaluation of general 16S ribosomal RNA gene PCR primers for classical and next-generation sequencing-based diversity studies Anna Klindworth, Elmar Pruesse, Timmy Schweer et al. · Nucleic Acids Research | 28 Aug 2012 | 9,235 |
| 49 | Approximation of terrestrial lead isotope evolution by a two-stage model J. S. Stacey, Jan D. Kramers · Earth and Planetary Science Letters | Jun 1975 | 9,132 |
| 50 | On the nature of allosteric transitions: A plausible model Jacques Monod, Jeffries Wyman, Jean‐Pierre Changeux · Journal of Molecular Biology | May 1965 | 8,938 |
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.