Highest Cited Archaeology Journal Papers

Using the Publisher or Perish citation analysis software I have been looking at the statistics for hundreds of English Language Archaeology Journals. One of the outputs from this software is the number of citations each individual paper within a journal receives. After a pretty extensive search of about 250 archaeology journals I am pretty confident I have found the top cited archaeology journal articles. The top three are:

1. 2607 citations

Radiocarbon Age Calibration, 24,000- 0 cal BP

MINZE ST UI VER,’ PA ULA J. REIMER,’ EDO UARD BARD, J. WARREN BECK, G. S. BURR, KONRAD A. HUGHEN, BERND KROMER, GERRY McCORMAC, JOHANNES VAN DER PLICHT and MARCO SPURK

Radiocarbon Vol. 40, No. 3, 1998, p. 1041-1083

2. 2080 ciations

Extended 14c Data Base and Revised Calib 3.0 14c Age Calibration Program

Stuiver M. and Reimer P.J

Radiocarbon Vol. 35, No. 1, 1993, p. 215-230

3. 1235 citations

Willow Smoke and Dogs’ Tails: Hunter-Gatherer Settlement Systems and Archaeological Site Formation

Lewis R. Binford

American Antiquity Vol. 45, No. 1 (Jan., 1980), pp. 4-20

The top list is pretty much dominated by radiocarbon dating papers. I took a look at some of the papers doing the citing and the reason radiocarbon dating does so well is because other disciplines, other than archaeology, heavily cite these papers. If we took away radio carbon dating papers number two on the list would be-

908 Citations

Archaeology as Anthropology

Lewis R. Binford

American Antiquity Vol. 28, No. 2 (Oct., 1962), pp. 217-225

Basically, if you want to get your journal articles as the top cited in archaeology ether do something cross disciplinary or be Lewis Binford.