Has the proportions of articles to citations changed? In 2014 Nature looked at the top 10 and top 100 papers with most citations.
Has similar research been done more recently?
I am particularly interested in whether the relative numbers have changed: In the image above 1000 citations would put a paper in the top 14499 of 57798126 papers = 0.025%. Since 2014 a lot of papers have been published (thus growing the pile), but more papers have also been cited (thus growing the part with 1000 citations). Do they grow equally? In other words: Would 1000 citations today still mean it is cited more than 99.975% of other papers? And if not: What are the numbers today?
Ideally the answer would include a percentile function that given a year and a percentage returns the number of citations to be in that percentile that year: percentile(year,pct) = number of citations.
That's a really fascinating question. I looked at the original Nature article (https://www.nature.com/news/the-top-100-papers-1.16224) - my initial intuition would be that the proportion shouldn't differ to significantly from the earlier one (it will most likely differ to some extent as there is no reason to expect the proportional growth of citations and the growth of papers to correlate), but we would of course need to calculate it.
Wouldn't the best course of action be to use a research database where you can filter by number of accrued citations, set that to display papers with &gt; 1000 citations and then divide the retrieved number with the total number of papers in that database? If you you wish to be consistent with the Nature article, I believe they did their analysis solely on Web of Science. Having that said, I'm not sure they provide these figures out of the box, it looks like Nature got special access to these figures for their article.