alt Hacker News> The most important papers mostly cite other important papers by a small number of outstanding scientists
The question here is: yes most major accomplishments cite other "giants," but how many papers have they read and have they cited everything that influenced them?
Or do people tend to cite the most pivotal nodes on the knowledge graph which are themselves pivotal nodes on the knowledge graph while ignoring the minor nodes that contributed to making the insight possible?
Lastly -- minor inputs can be hard to cite. What if you read a paper a year ago that planted an interesting idea in your head but it wasn't conclusive, or gave you a little tidbit of information that nudged your thinking in a certain direction? You might not even remember, or the information might be background enough that it's only alluded to or indirectly contributes to the final product. Thus it doesn't get a citation. But could the final product have happened without a large number of these inputs?
It also depends what the "most important papers" actually are. What is it that makes something a breakthrough?
Suppose I'm analyzing a species of bacteria with some well-known techniques and I discover it produces an enzyme with promising medical properties. I cite some other research on that species, I cite a couple papers about my analytical tools. This is paper A.
Other scientists start trying to replicate my findings and discover that my compound really lives up to its promise. A huge meta-analysis is published with a hundred citations—paper B—and my compound becomes a new life-saving medicine.
Which paper is the "important" one? A or B? In the long run, paper A may get more citations, but bear in mind that paper A is, in and of itself, not terribly unique. People discover compounds with the potential to be useful all the time. It's in paper B, in the validation of that potential, that science determines whether something truly valuable has been discovered.
Was paper A a uniquely inspired work of genius, or is science a distributed process of trial and error where we sometimes get lucky? I'm not sure we can decide this based on how many citations paper A winds up with.