Most-cited research papers of 2025–2026

The most-cited research paper published in 2025 or 2026 is "Cancer statistics, 2025" (CA A Cancer Journal for Clinicians), with 3,120 citations so far.

Updated automatically every day. Data: 29 fully counted days, September 26, 2026 – October 24, 2026. Source: OpenAlex and PubMed.

Top 20 most-cited papers of the last two years

#	Paper	Journal	Year	Citations
1	Cancer statistics, 2025	CA A Cancer Journal for Clinicians	2025	3,120
2	MEGA12: Molecular Evolutionary Genetic Analysis Version 12 for Adaptive and Green Computing	Molecular Biology and Evolution	2024	2,523
3	A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models: Principles, Taxonomy, Challenges, and Open Questions	ACM Transactions on Information Systems	2024	2,488
4	Let's Take the Con out of Econometrics	Journal of Business Cycle Research	2026	2,202
5	A Survey of Large Language Models	Frontiers of Computer Science	2026	2,075
6	Definition and diagnostic criteria of clinical obesity	The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology	2025	1,782
7	World Stroke Organization: Global Stroke Fact Sheet 2025	International Journal of Stroke	2024	1,475
8	PubChem 2025 update	Nucleic Acids Research	2024	1,405
9	2. Diagnosis and Classification of Diabetes: Standards of Care in Diabetes—2025	Diabetes Care	2024	1,378
10	A Comprehensive Overview of Large Language Models	ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology	2025	1,250

Most-cited papers of all time

#	Paper	Journal	Year	Citations
1	PROTEIN MEASUREMENT WITH THE FOLIN PHENOL REAGENT	Journal of Biological Chemistry	1951	317,577
2	A Rapid and Sensitive Method for the Quantitation of Microgram Quantities of Protein Utilizing the Principle of Protein-Dye Binding	Analytical Biochemistry	1976	255,240
3	Cleavage of Structural Proteins during the Assembly of the Head of Bacteriophage T4	Nature	1970	249,951
4	Generalized Gradient Approximation Made Simple	Physical Review Letters	1996	215,194
5	Using thematic analysis in psychology	Qualitative Research in Psychology	2006	193,594
6	Analysis of Relative Gene Expression Data Using Real-Time Quantitative PCR and the 2−ΔΔCT Method	Methods	2001	180,716
7	Random Forests	Machine Learning	2001	132,660
8	Efficient iterative schemes for ab initio total-energy calculations using a plane-wave basis set	Physical review. B, Condensed matter	1996	123,426
9	ImageNet classification with deep convolutional neural networks	Communications of the ACM	2017	112,136
10	Controlling the False Discovery Rate: A Practical and Powerful Approach to Multiple Testing	Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B (Statistical Methodology)	1995	109,135

Why are these papers cited so much?

Papers that describe widely used methods, software, statistics or guidelines collect the most citations, because thousands of later studies rely on them. Yearly cancer statistics, analysis tools and survey papers on fast-moving fields such as large language models are typical examples.

See today's citation movers on the papers page.