The 100 most-cited articles from JMB

Over the last 40 years, JMB has published many thousands of articles, all of which have been important in some way. Compiling a list of the 'most important' however, is an invidious task. Friendships can falter on such an undertaking, but the Institute of Scientific Information has provided us with an objective methodology for 'ranking' articles, according to the number of times any paper is cited in other publications. This evaluation can of course be criticised for its bias towards papers describing novel techniques or methods. Often, the true intellectual milestones may be found in the reference list of the most cited papers. With increasing age, each paper also has more time in which to have been cited, and so the group of highest scoring articles is also dominated by some of the oldest. On the other hand, with increasing time, papers have an increasing chance of being forgotten, and the citation rates of these are therefore also a measure of their persisting importance. On balance, it does represent a value in some way related to how often that paper has been used. With many caveats, we present the list of the 100 most cited papers in JMB over the past 40 years. Many of these papers have helped or influenced both a great many people, and a great many subsequent advances in molecular biology.