In a given (sub)field, the highest-cited papers tend to be those which introduced or substantially improved on a key idea/result/concept; so they’re important in that sense. If you’re looking for the best introduction though that will often be a textbook, and there might be important caveats or limitations in a later and less-cited paper.
I’ve also had a problem where a few highly cited papers propose $approach, many papers apply or puport to extend it, and then eventually someone does a well-powered study checking whether $approach actually works. Either way that’s an important paper, but they tend to be under-cited either because either the results are “obvious” (and usually a small effect) or the field of $approach studies shrinks considerably.
It’s an extremely goodhartable metric but perhaps the best we have for papers; for authors I tend to ask “does this person have good taste in problems (important+tractable), and are their methods appropriate to the task?”.
Important for what? Best for what?
In a given (sub)field, the highest-cited papers tend to be those which introduced or substantially improved on a key idea/result/concept; so they’re important in that sense. If you’re looking for the best introduction though that will often be a textbook, and there might be important caveats or limitations in a later and less-cited paper.
I’ve also had a problem where a few highly cited papers propose $approach, many papers apply or puport to extend it, and then eventually someone does a well-powered study checking whether $approach actually works. Either way that’s an important paper, but they tend to be under-cited either because either the results are “obvious” (and usually a small effect) or the field of $approach studies shrinks considerably.
It’s an extremely goodhartable metric but perhaps the best we have for papers; for authors I tend to ask “does this person have good taste in problems (important+tractable), and are their methods appropriate to the task?”.