In any scholarly field, some works are widely acknowledged as classics, whereas the rest—indeed, the great majority—are little noted nor long remembered. Indeed, according to the “Iron Law of Important Articles,” the number of significant articles increases only to the extent of the square root of the number of published articles (Holub, Tappeiner, and Eberharter 1991). It follows that as a research literature grows, important articles constitute an ever-decreasing proportion of the total output.

Which of the thousands of articles that have appeared in the Review over the years stand out as the most important? The answer obviously depends on how “importance” is defined. One standard approach is to gauge an article's importance in terms of the attention it has received within the scholarly community, as indicated by the number of references to it in the research literature. Although this approach is open to criticism on many grounds,¹

it is, for want of a better alternative, the approach pursued here.

Most of the articles that have appeared in the Review since its inception in 1906 have rarely if ever been cited. At the opposite extreme, some have had a substantial impact by political science standards, though not necessarily by the standards of at least one of our neighboring disciplines. Overall, by the end of 2005, some 155 Review articles had been cited 100 or more times, and one (Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz's “Two Faces of Power”) had been cited more than 500 times. By comparison, more than twice as many articles in the American Sociological Review, the “flagship” journal in sociology, had topped 100 citations, and a score had surpassed the 500 mark (Jacobs 2005, 1).²

This interdisciplinary difference, which is especially striking because political science is a much larger discipline than sociology, appears for the most part to be a manifestation of the attention that sociological research receives from out-side of sociology—a phenomenon less apparent in political science.³ It is the very rare Review article that has become a standard point of reference or an object of encompassing interest for those in other disciplines, consistent with the image of political science as a “borrower” discipline theoretically and methodologically.

Table 1 shows when each member of the Review's “100+ Club” appeared. The earliest (L. S. Shapley and Martin Shubik's “A Method for Evaluating the Distribution of Power in a Committee System”) was published in 1954, and only two others (Seymour Martin Lipset's “Some Social Requisites of Democracy” and Robert A. Dahl's “A Critique of the Ruling Elite Model”) hail from the 1950s.⁴

The numerous articles that even the most illustrious political scientists of an earlier era (e.g., Carl Friedrich, V. O. Key, Harold Lasswell, Charles Merriam, and Hans Morgenthau, to name just a few) contributed to the Review are now largely forgotten, bespeaking political scientists' inattentiveness to their disciplinary forebears.⁵

At the other end of the time scale, within just a few years of their publication in 2000, two Review articles (Paul Pierson's “Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics” and Gary King et al.'s “Analyzing Incomplete Political Science Data: An Alternative Algorithm for Multiple Imputation”) had already joined the 100+ Club. A more typical citation path for frequently cited articles, though, is the one followed by “Two Faces of Power.”⁶

As can be seen in Figure 1, the Review's all-time citation leader was by no means an instant classic. It was not until several years after it appeared that citations to it reached double digits per year; but since rising to that level it has displayed impressive staying power, belying the notion that scholarly articles “have only a brief moment in the sun when they are likely to be cited frequently” (Stewart 1983, 171). Most of the other articles on the Review's “Top 20” list have followed more or less the sameroute, but some notable exceptions are also shown in Figure 1: the late blooming of Seymour Martin Lipset's “Some Social Requisites of Democracy,” the quasi-linear growth of references to William H. Riker and Peter C. Ordeshook's “A Theory of the Calculus of Voting,” and the surge and decline in the impact of Karl W. Deutsch's “Social Mobilization and Political Development.”

Space considerations preclude listing all 155 articles with 100 or more citations.⁷

The top 20 are identified in Table 2. Why have these articles in particular stood out from all the rest? Citation frequency data alone can only identify the standouts and cannot even begin to account for their prominence.⁸ Thus, for pertinent insights let us turn to those who are best qualified to comment: the distinguished scholars who either produced these articles or who are standing in for those who did.⁹