Jointly published by Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest Scientometrics,

and Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht Vol. 61, No. 2 (2004) 147–156

Highly cited old papers and the reasons why they continue
to be cited. Part II.
The 1953 Watson and Crick article on the structure of DNA*

TANZILA AHMED, BEN JOHNSON, CHARLES OPPENHEIM, CATHERINE PECK

Department of Information Science, Loughborough University, Loughborough (UK)

Reports the results of a citation study on Watson and Crick’s 1953 paper announcing the
discovery of the double helix structure of DNA. The paper has been cited more than 2,000 times
since 1961, and there is no sign of any obsolescence to this article. An analysis was undertaken of
the journals in which the citations appeared, and of mistakes in the bibliographic citations provided
by citing articles. Watson and Crick themselves have only cited their own paper twice since 1961.
An analysis was also undertaken of the reasons why the paper was cited; 100 citing articles
were identified and read. The reasons for citing were then categorised using the Oppenheim and
Renn method. Compared to earlier studies, it was found that a greater proportion of citations were
for historical reasons, a smaller proportion of citing articles were actively using the Watson and
Crick article, and a similar, but low proportion were criticising the Watson and Crick article.

Introduction

It is now more than 50 years since Watson and Crick published their seminal paper
(WATSON & CRICK, 1953) on the double helix structure of DNA. It is widely recognised
as one of the most important scientific articles of the twentieth century. We therefore
decided a citation study of the article would be worthwhile. A literature search failed to
reveal any such study had been carried out hitherto other than its key position
in the historiograph to track the history of the science of DNA to be found in
(GARFIELD, 1979).
Almost all journal articles that appear in the scientific literature contain citations. A
citation is a reference to some previously published work that is relevant to the

* Based on a paper given at Café Scientifique, Nottingham, March 2003. For Part I of this series,
see (OPPENHEIM & RENN, 1978).

Received July 14, 2003

Address for correspondence:
CHARLES OPPENHEIM
Department of Information Science, Loughborough University
Loughborough, Leics LE11 3TU, UK
E-mail: c.oppenheim@lboro.ac.uk

0138–9130/2004/US $ 20.00
Copyright © 2004 Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest
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T. AHMED et al.: Highly cited old papers

argument the author wants to make. The author may be criticising the earlier item, may
be building on it, may be using it to enhance his argument, or may be acknowledging an
early pioneer (CRONIN, 1984; GARFIELD, 1979). So, authors use citations because they
believe the earlier item is relevant and wish to draw readers’ attention to it.
Watson and Crick’s article, for example, provides six references at the end of the
article, some of which are being used to support Watson and Crick’s arguments. One of
references cited by Watson and Crick, an earlier paper written by Pauling and Corey,
was criticised by Watson and Crick.

Citation studies

Science Citation Index provides the means for seeing how many times any article,
such as the Watson and Crick’s paper has been cited in later articles. From the very first
edition of Science Citation Index, people have considered the possibility of using the
wealth of machine-readable data in it to carry out citation studies. However, as is well
known, citation studies are controversial. There have been many criticisms of studies
over the years, see, for example (MACROBERTS & MACROBERTS, 1989; MOED, 2002;
WARNER, 2000). They include issues such as the inadequate coverage of ISI’s suite of
citation indexes, and the fact that citations are given for a variety of reasons, including:
paying homage to pioneers in the field - typically characterised by citations to papers
many years old (the focus of this paper); giving credit to related work; when a standard
methodology or piece of equipment has been used, cite the reference to it rather than
describe it in detail; background to the topic; correcting or criticising the previous
paper; corroboration for one’s ideas or claims; drawing attention to previous work that
is not well known, and ought to be.
Another criticism is that citation counting reduces everything down to mere
numbers, and more subtle criteria such as “quality” and “influence” are not taken into
account.
Taking all these points into account, it is perhaps surprising that when one compares
citation counts to other objective or subjective studies of the impact of an individual, a
department, an institution, a journal, or an entire country,* statistically significant
correlations are usually found (BAIRD & OPPENHEIM, 1994; OPPENHEIM, 1995; SENG &
WILLETT, 1995; TAYLOR, 1995). For example, Nobel Prize winners on average get 30
times as many citations as non Nobel Prize winners (GARFIELD, 1979).

* Using, for example, the following measures: Receipt of the Nobel Prize; score in a Research Assessment
Exercise; membership of major scientific academies, such as the Royal Society; receipt of large awards of
research funding; assessment of status by your peer group; or use of the scientist by Government on an
advisory committee.

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 T. AHMED et al.: Highly cited old papers

On the other hand, there is the danger of citation oblivion, a phenomenon closely
related to the obsolescence of the literature. If you make such a major and important
contribution to the field that it becomes generally accepted, you no longer get cited.
After all, it might be argued, no-one is likely to bother to cite Einstein’s paper, which
had the famous equation

E = mc2
As it happens, the Einstein paper is still cited regularly, although not as heavily as
Crick and Watson. Watson and Crick’s paper, which might be thought to fall into the
same heading, is much more heavily cited.

Our research
The Watson and Crick article appeared in 1953. Science Citation Index started in
1961. Therefore, it is not possible to use ISI services to identify what articles cited the
Watson and Crick article between 1953 and 1961. The services we used to carry out the
citation search were printed Science Citation Index for the period 1961 to 1980, and ISI
Web of Science on the MIMAS host* for the period 1981 to the end of 2002, which was
our cut off date. The first stage of the research was simply to see who was citing
Watson and Crick. Details of the year of the citing reference, the citing journal, whether
this was a self-citation (i.e., either Watson or Crick were citing themselves), whether
Watson or Crick’s name appeared in the title of the citing reference, and whether there
were any errors in the bibliographic details for the Watson and Crick paper were noted
and were entered into a spreadsheet.

Results of the first stage of the research

We found that between 1961 and the end of 2002; there were 2,061 citations to the
Watson and Crick article, an average of 49 citations per year. Table 1 shows that the
numbers of times the Watson and Crick article has been cited has remained steady over
the years, and indeed, in recent years the numbers have gone up. The average number of
citations per year in the last ten years was nearly 81 citations per year, and 2002 was the
year the paper received the most citations ever.
This result is counter-intuitive, as, even taking into account the growth of the
potentially citing literature covered by ISI, one normally expects the numbers of
citations to any given paper decline over time, i.e. obsolescence (ALVAREZ et al., 2000)
should take place, as the areas of interest to scientists move on, and as any seminal
paper becomes embedded into the scientific subconscious without having to be referred
to explicitly.

* Available at http://www.mimas.ac.uk

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T. AHMED et al.: Highly cited old papers

Table 1. Number of citations per year

Year # Year # Year #
1961 47 1975 21 1989 43
1962 48 1976 33 1990 55
1963 78 1977 33 1991 32
1964 48 1978 38 1992 46
1965 50 1979 31 1993 88
1966 41 1980 29 1994 58
1967 33 1981 43 1995 62
1968 36 1982 32 1996 81
1969 37 1983 48 1997 75
1970 28 1984 47 1998 88
1971 30 1985 47 1999 71
1972 30 1986 40 2000 90
1973 35 1987 38 2001 87
1974 23 1988 35 2002 106
2003 3

Table 2 provides a list of the journals in which the articles that quote Watson and
Crick are to be found.
Watson and Crick published their article in the journal Nature. By a short margin, it
is later articles in the same journal, Nature, that cite Watson and Crick the most. Most
of the journal titles that cite the Watson and Crick article are predictable, though the
large number of times that articles citing Watson and Crick have appeared in Journal of
Chemical Education (which is a journal aimed at chemistry schoolteachers)
demonstrates not merely how important the article is to school curricula, but arguably
also how readable it is. However, the vast majority of the journals have titles that place
them firmly into the subject area of Watson and Crick’s subject. In other words,
biochemists and nucleic acid researchers continue to find the Watson and Crick article
relevant.
What is surprising is the fact that only two (0.097%) of the more than 2,000 articles
citing Watson and Crick were written by Watson or Crick. This is a very low self-
citation rate. In most subject areas, something like 10% of the citations to an article are
self-citations (SNYDER & BONZI, 1998). The tiny percentage of self-citations for the
Watson and Crick article either demonstrates that Watson and Crick moved rapidly on
to other topics and left the structure of DNA behind them, or stayed in the field but felt
no need to quote their own 1953 article. Since we have not carried out a study on
Watson and Crick’s publications since the early 1960s, we cannot state which
explanation (or whether perhaps a combination of the two) applies.

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Table 2. List of journals in which the Watson & Crick paper was cited
Citations per
Journal title % of total
journal
Nature 69 3.34
Journal of the American Chemical Society 64 3.10
Journal of Molecular Biology 61 2.95
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 42 2.03
Biopolymers 40 1.94
Science 38 1.84
Journal of Theoretical Biology 36 1.74
Biochimica et Biophysica Acta 29 1.40
Biochemistry 28 1.36
Annual Review of Biochemistry 21 1.02
International Journal of Quantum Chemistry 21 1.02
Journal of Biomolecular Structure & Dynamics 18 0.87
Journal of Biological Chemistry 16 0.77
Nucleic Acids Research 16 0.77
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 14 0.68
Chemical Reviews 14 0.68
Current Contents 14 0.68
Journal of Chemical Education 14 0.68
Journal of Physical Chemistry A 14 0.68
Trends in Biochemical Sciences 14 0.68
Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 13 0.63
Genetics 12 0.58
Journal of Chemical Physics 12 0.58
JAMA - Journal of the American Medical Association 11 0.53
Biochemical Journal 10 0.48
Biophysical Journal 10 0.48
Cold Spring Harbor Symposia Quantitative Biology 10 0.48
Current Science 10 0.48
Naturwissenschaften 10 0.48
Chemical Physics 9 0.44
Helvetica Chimica Acta 9 0.44
Journal of Physical Chemistry 9 0.44
Journal of Physical Chemistry B 9 0.44
Angewandte Chemie - International Edition in English 8 0.39
Archives of Biochemistry and Biophysics 8 0.39
Bioscience 8 0.39
Gene 8 0.39
Journal of Scientific & Industrial Research 8 0.39
Postepy Biochemii 8 0.39
Acta Crystallographica 7 0.34
Angewandte Chemie 7 0.34
FEBS Letters 7 0.34
Journal of Molecular Structure 7 0.34
Macromolecules 7 0.34
Methods in Enzymology 7 0.34

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We found that 85 (4.12%) of the articles quoting Watson and Crick misquote the
volume number or page number of the seminal Nature article, thereby showing at
minimum, these authors of the citing documents are quite unlikely to have been
consulting the original article when they made their citation.
The fact that citation errors are reproduced does not, however, always mean that the
citers have not read the original article, as they may have read the article, and then
simply copied and pasted their reference list from an ainaccurate electronic source.
Simkin and Roychowdhury have estimated that at least 17% of authors who cite have
not read the paper they cited (SIMKIN & ROYCHOWDHURY, 2003).

Why is the article being cited?

There are three main ways one can find out the reasons for citations: the first is to
develop a typology (or use an existing typology) of reasons for citing, see, e.g., (CANO,
1989; OPPENHEIM & RENN, 1978), inspect the citing articles and form one’s own
judgement as to the reason why the citation took place. The second way is to interview
citers some time after their article was published to ask them to recall why they cited the
earlier item (BROOKS, 1985, 1986); the third is to interview scholars at the time they are
writing an article to ask them why they are citing what they are citing (CASE &
HIGGINS, 2000). Each of three methods has its pros and cons. The former is easiest to
carry out, but inevitably involves an element of arbitrary guesswork, tying to put
oneself in the mind of the author of the citing article and trying to judge, for example, if
(s)he is being critical of the cited author or not. The second method is extremely labour
intensive, and relies on the honesty and reliability of the memory of the citing authors.
Furthermore, only those authors with an interest in the research are likely to respond to
approaches, so the respondent sample will be biased. The final method is also labour
intensive, and would have required us to know who is currently writing articles that cite
Watson and Crick. In practice, this is difficult to achieve.
We decided to use the first method. We examined a semi-random sample of the
articles that cite Watson and Crick to assess the reasons why they were citing Watson
and Crick. We focussed on articles published in the last ten years, and built up a
collection of 100 different citations to Watson and Crick in 98 articles that were
accessible in Loughborough University Library, either in hard copy or electronic form.
Between them, the 98 articles cited Watson and Crick 100 times; in two cases, there
were two separate citations to Watson and Crick.
No claim is made that this is necessarily a representative sample of all the citing
articles, though we have no reason to think the sample was in any way particularly
biased. We used the classification system developed for the earlier paper in this series
(OPPENHEIM & RENN, 1978) rather than the other well known classifications developed
by Chubin (essential affirmative versus supplementary affirmative versus negational

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citations) (CHUBIN & MOITRA, 1975) or the conceptual versus operational, organic
versus perfunctory, evolutionary versus juxtopositional and confirmative versus
negational Moravcsik classification of citations (MORAVCSIK & MURUGESAN, 1975) for
two reasons: firstly, the classification we used is the only one specifically developed to
analyse reasons for citing very old papers; and secondly, because of our greater
familiarity with its use. This classification breaks reasons for citing articles into seven
broad headings, labelled ‘A’ to ‘G’.
‘A’ is used when articles were cited for historical reasons. This included citations,
which stated that Watson and Crick were the first to elucidate the structure of DNA, or
were simply paying homage to them as pioneers. If an article cited Watson and Crick
because it was simply “previous work” or work that was related to the current work,
then it, too, was given category A. A was also used when the idea or concept of the
double helix was discussed with a citation to Watson and Crick.
‘B’ was used when the content of the Watson and Crick article was discussed in
some detail rather than simply mentioned in passing. Thus, for example, if specific
results from Watson and Crick were quoted, this would be category B. If the author
agreed with a specific statement made by Watson and Crick, this, too, was placed
under B.
Category ‘C’ was used in cases where the citing author made specific use, other than
comparison, of data contained in the cited paper. We did not expect many examples of
this, as the Watson and Crick paper is short on specific data.
Similarly, category ‘D’ was used when the citing article made use of data for
comparison purposes with their own results. Again, we expected few cases of this type.
Category ‘E’ was used when a theoretical equation developed in the cited paper was
used in the citing paper.
Category ‘F’ was used whenever a paper stated it had used the same methods or
practical techniques as those employed by the cited paper. In this case, the methods
used by Watson and Crick were standard X-ray crystallographic analysis, so we were
not expecting many citations to fall into this category.
Finally, category ‘G’ was used for the normative process in science, i.e., when a
citing paper was criticising the Watson and Crick paper, e.g., disagreeing with its
methods, results or conclusions.
We read each article carefully before assigning citations in it to a heading. In some
cases, it was difficult to judge why that particular author had cited Watson and Crick.
This was because the articles we examined were often very technical, and we did not
have the necessary scientific expertise. Nevertheless, Table 3 shows that the reasons for
citations were not often technical even though the articles in which the work was cited
were often heavily scientific.

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Table 3. Why is Watson and Crick still being cited these days?
Classification Meaning Frequency
A Historical background 48
B Description of other relevant work, e.g., describing or discussing the work 37
in some detail or quoting from its results, or saying how the theory could
be used
C Made specific use (other than for comparison) of information contained 4
in the cited paper
D Made use of data for comparison purposes 0
E Use of theoretical equation for calculation purposes 5
F Use of practical or theoretical methods in the cited paper to solve a problem 4
G Criticism of the cited paper 2
Total 100

Classification is from OPPENHEIM & RENN (1978).

We found that exactly 75% of the citations in the articles cited Watson and Crick for
historical acknowledgement or background discussion of the work itself. In our earlier
research on highly cited old physics and physical chemistry articles, we found that
58.0% of the citing articles fell into ‘A’ or ‘B’. We found just two articles, i.e. 2%,
which criticised the Watson-Crick theory or said it needed to be developed further. In
our earlier research, we found a similar proportion (1.5%) criticised their earlier papers.
We found that 13% of the sample were actively using the Watson-Crick methods or
results, compared to 40.4% in the case of our earlier research.
Of course, this method is not perfect; setting our own opinions on why authors cite
is very subjective and it would ideally have been a good idea to have consulted the
citing authors as to their reasons on why they still cite Watson and Crick today. But this
would have been time consuming and expensive.
We also found that not surprisingly, in the majority of cases, the Watson and Crick
article was cited on the first few pages of the citing article, i.e., mainly in the
introduction or historical background sections. We also found that Watson & Crick’s
names were often specifically mentioned within articles, sometimes several times.
Amongst the more unusual titles for articles that we found citing Watson and Crick
were the following:
• Political Issues in the Genome Error
• The Incredible Life and Times of Biological Cells.
• Architecture of the invisible.
• Better mousetraps, expert advice, and lessons of history.
• Life: the defining enigma of biology.
• Light on a dark lady.

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Conclusions

Our first conclusion is that the Watson and Crick article continues to be heavily
cited to this day, and indeed is getting more quoted than ever. We are not aware of any
research showing that articles enjoy an increasing citation count when 50 years old. It is
not clear why the paper continues to be cited so heavily compared to, say, a similar
seminal paper in physics or chemistry. One possible reason is James Watson’s book The
Double Helix. This book is an excellent popularisation of science which placed Watson
and Crick’s name firmly on the map as the individuals associated with the discovery of
DNA. Thus, we found that closely related articles that were crucially important to the
discovery of DNA, including papers in the same issue of Nature as Watson and Crick,
received far fewer citations. Perhaps high citations are associated with good public
relations and popular writing skills?
Secondly, Watson and Crick quickly left the topic of the structure of DNA behind,
and no longer refer to it themselves. Thirdly, confirming the results of earlier studies on
old papers, virtually no-one criticises the Watson and Crick paper or its proposed
structure of DNA. Next, virtually all the people who quote the article are in the field of
biochemistry and nucleic acid research.
Finally, whilst a lot of the citing articles were simply referring to Watson and Crick
in a historical context, 13% actively used the article’s methods and results.

We wish to thank our referees for their helpful comments, and Café Scientifique Nottingham for the
original invitation which led to this research.

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