I can completely believe that these papers were successful (as measured by citations for example), but that does not necessarily mean they were the most useful papers or that people got the most out of them.
In a typical paper, somewhere in the introduction it will be necessary to say some basic “establishing the field” statements. Academics want to support these statements with references. A reference that says some basic thing, in plain words with very little technical hedging, is much easier to find and cite than a series of more targeted and precise points that add up to the same thing. At least in my field the papers that get the most citations are exactly these introduction citation ones.
A good example of an arguably “obvious” result making big waves is DiVincenzo’s criteria. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DiVincenzo%27s_criteria. I don’t think that many people really would have questioned that a “useful quantum computer” needed to be able to [I have changed the order of the 5 criteria] (2) write data, (4) do logic gates. (5) read data. While also being (1) big enough to be useful and (3) quantum. Its not a million miles from a tautology, with (1) and (3) translating to “useful” and “quantum” and (2,4,5) being pre-requisites for a thing to be called a computer. But, if I am writing a paper introduction saying “X satisfies the Divincenzo criteria [1]” sounds so much cooler and more considered than “X is a possibly a good platform for quantum computing”.
[I am sure that spelling out the criteria was useful. But suspect that the level of attention, as measured by citation, is probably outsized relative to the usefulness.]
I can completely believe that these papers were successful (as measured by citations for example), but that does not necessarily mean they were the most useful papers or that people got the most out of them.
In a typical paper, somewhere in the introduction it will be necessary to say some basic “establishing the field” statements. Academics want to support these statements with references. A reference that says some basic thing, in plain words with very little technical hedging, is much easier to find and cite than a series of more targeted and precise points that add up to the same thing. At least in my field the papers that get the most citations are exactly these introduction citation ones.
A good example of an arguably “obvious” result making big waves is DiVincenzo’s criteria. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DiVincenzo%27s_criteria. I don’t think that many people really would have questioned that a “useful quantum computer” needed to be able to [I have changed the order of the 5 criteria] (2) write data, (4) do logic gates. (5) read data. While also being (1) big enough to be useful and (3) quantum. Its not a million miles from a tautology, with (1) and (3) translating to “useful” and “quantum” and (2,4,5) being pre-requisites for a thing to be called a computer. But, if I am writing a paper introduction saying “X satisfies the Divincenzo criteria [1]” sounds so much cooler and more considered than “X is a possibly a good platform for quantum computing”.
[I am sure that spelling out the criteria was useful. But suspect that the level of attention, as measured by citation, is probably outsized relative to the usefulness.]