The most-cited papers of the twenty-first century

Helen Pearson, Heidi Ledford, Matthew Hutson & Richard Van Noorden, Exclusive: the most-cited papers of the twenty-first century: A Nature analysis reveals the 25 highest-cited papers published this century and explores why they are breaking records, Nature, 15 April 2025. (Supplementary information)

Papers in AI:

• Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition
• Random Forests
• Attention is all you need
• ImageNet classification with deep convolutional neural networks
• U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation
• Fitting Linear Mixed-Effects Models Using lme4
• Scikit-learn: Machine learning in Python
• Deep learning
• ImageNet: A Large-Scale Hierarchical Image Database

Also highly-cited: 

• Distinctive image features from scale-invariant keypoints
• Adam: A method for stochastic optimization
• Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition
• BERT: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding