Over the past decade, the hottest papers in black hole science have
been led by the search for supermassive black holes in galactic nuclei
and, not surprisingly, at the center of our galaxy in the vicinity of
Sagittarius A*. Also dominating the list are theoretical models of
advection-dominated black holes and the relationships between
supermassive black holes, their host galaxies, and the dynamics of
their accretion discs; other models concern stellar mass black holes
that might generate gamma-ray bursts.
On the theoretical physics side of black holes, the list is
dominated by the analysis of massless black holes in string theory and
the line of exploration that leads from the entropy of these
infinitesimal black holes to the construction of multi-dimensional
membranes—known as d-branes—and quantum mechanics.
In the past two years, the top-20 list of hottest papers has been
infiltrated by a host of papers discussing predictions of
extra-dimensional scenarios in which these high-energy black holes are
produced copiously in collisions between high-energy cosmic neutrinos
and nucleons in the atmosphere and in proton-proton collisions at the
Large Hadron Collider (LHC) being constructed at CERN. These papers
discuss how these black holes would manifest themselves upon creation
and the possibility of their detection at both the LHC and at
high-energy cosmic ray observatories.
Methodology
To construct this database,
papers were extracted based on title- keywords for Black Holes. The keywords used were as follows:
black hole*
The baseline time span for this database
is 1993-2003. The resulting database contained 4,844
ten-year papers (all); 1,079 two-year papers; 4,145 authors; 70 countries;
242 journals; and 1,331 institutions.
Rankings
Once the database was in place,
it was used to generate the lists of top 20 papers, authors, journals,
institutions, and nations, covering a time span of 1993-2003.
The top 20 papers are ranked
according to total cites. Rankings for author, journal, institution,
and country are listed in three ways: according to total cites, total
papers, and total cites/paper. The paper thresholds used to determine
scientist, institution, country, and journal rankings according to
total cites/paper were as follows: 19, 28, 22, and 35, respectively. These
thresholds correspond to the top 1% of authors, 5% of institutions, 50% of countries and
10% of journals by total papers.
