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Astronomy's Greatest Hits: The 100 most Cited Papers in Each Year of the First Decade of the 21st Century (2000 - 2009)

This paper is based on the 100 most cited papers in astronomy for each year from 2000 to 2009 and from 1995 and 1990. The main findings are: The total number of authors of the top 100 articles per year has more than tripled. This is seen most strongly in papers with more than 6 authors. The yearly number of papers with 5 or fewer authors has declined over the same time period. The most highly cited papers tend to have the largest number of authors and visa versa. The distribution of normalized citation counts versus ranking is constant from year to year except for the top ranked half dozen or so papers. It is closely approximated by a power law. The papers that show the most divergence from the power law all have a high number of citations and are based on large surveys. The average page length of the top 100 papers is one and a half times that for astronomy papers in general. The same 5 journals (A&A, AJ, ApJ, ApJS, and MNRAS) account for 80 to 85% of the total citations for each year of all the journals in the category "Astronomy and Astrophysics" by ISI's Journal Citation Reports. These same 5 journals account for 77% of the 1000 most cited papers. A significant number of articles originally ranked in the top 100 for a year, drop out after 2 to 3 years and are replaced by other articles. Most of the drop-outs deal with extra-galactic astronomy; their replacements deal with non-extra-galactic topics. Indicators of internet access to astronomical web sites such as data archives and journal repositories show increases of between factors of three and ten or more I propose that there are close complementarities between the communication capabilities that internet usage enables and the strong growth in numbers of authors of the most highly cited papers.