Simply Statistics A statistics blog by Rafa Irizarry, Roger Peng, and Jeff Leek

What are the 5 most influential statistics papers of 2000-2010?

A few folks here at Hopkins were just reading the comments of our post on  awesome young/senior statisticians. It was cool to see the diversity of opinions and all the impressive people working in our field. We realized that another question we didn’t have a great answer to was:

What are the 5 most influential statistics papers of the aughts (2000-2010)?

Now that the auggies or aughts or whatever are a few years behind us, we have the benefit of a little hindsight and can get a reasonable measure of retrospective impact.

Since this is a pretty broad question I’d thought I’d lay down some generic ground rules for nominations:

  1. Papers must have been published in 2000-2010.
  2. Papers must primarily report a statistical method or analysis (the impact shouldn’t be only because of the scientific result).
  3. Papers may be published in either statistical or applied journals.

For extra credit, along with your list give your definition of impact. Mine would be something like:

  • Has been cited at a high rate in scientific papers (in other words, it is used by science, not just cited by statisticians trying to beat it)
  • Has corresponding software that has been used
  • Made simpler/changed the way we did a specific type of analysis

I don’t have my list yet (I know, a cop-out) but I’m working on it.