In Hmolpedia, the highly-cited thermodynamics publications page list those articles, books, or textbooks that are often said to be "highly-cited" or "most-cited" publications in human thermodynamics (HT), life thermodynamics (LT), or economic thermodynamics (ET), among others. The following table gives an indication of citation magnitude according to Google scholar citation count:
| Date | Human Thermodynamics Publication | Author(s) | Cited by (2010) | |
| 1977 | Self-Organization in Nonequilibrium Systems: from Dissipative Structures to Order through Fluctuations |  | Ilya Prigogine | 4445 |
| 1923 | The Ego and the Id |  | Sigmund Freud | 4279 |
| 1971 | The Entropy Law and the Economic Process |  | Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen | 2733 |
| 1944 | What is Life? |  | Erwin Schrodinger | 2723 |
| 1925 | Elements of Physical Biology |  | Alfred Lotka | 2255 |
| 1984 | Order Out of Chaos | | Ilya Prigogine | 1965 |
| 2002 | Ecological Stoichiometry: the Biology of the Elements from Molecules to the Biosphere |   | Robert Sterner James Elser | 887 |
| 1955 | The Phenomenon of Man |  | Pierre Teilhard | 883 |
| 1990 | Flow - the Psychology of Optimal Experience |  | Mihály Csíkszentmihályi | 684 |
| 1912 | The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche |  | Carl Jung | 426 |
| 1943 | “Energy and the Evolution of Culture” |  | Leslie White | 193 |
| 1926 | Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt: the Solution of the Economic Paradox |  | Frederick Soddy | 102 |
| 1919 | The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma |  | Henry Adams and Brooks Adams | 78 |
| 1952 | The Next Million Years |  | C.G. Darwin | 93 |
| 1973 | “Slavery, Surplus, and Stratification on the Northwest Coast: the Ethnoenergetics of an Incipient Stratification System.” |  | Eugene Ruyle | 43 |
| 1995 | “Thermodynamics and Biological Evolution” |  | Georgi Gladyshev | 22 |
| 1997 | Thermodynamic Theory of the Evolution of Living Beings | | Georgi Gladyshev | 17 |
| 1910 | A Letter to American Teachers of History | | Henry Adams | 14 |
| 1898 | Essay on Social Mechanics |  | Leon Winiarski | 7 |
| 2007 | Human Chemistry |  | Libb Thims | 5 |
Thermodynamics publications
The following are significant thermodynamics publications, connected or related significantly to human activity, with notable citation counts, albeit ones that do not make direct hypotheses concerning human existence:
| Thermodynamics Publication | Significance | Authors(s) | Cited by (2010) | ||
| “Principles that Govern the Folding of Protein Chains.” | Proved the thermodynamic hypothesis. |  | Christian Anfinsen | 3156 | |
| Scientific Papers of J. Willard Gibbs, Vol. 1, Thermodynamics (1876) |  | Willard Gibbs | 438 | ||
| Thermodynamics and the Free Energy of Chemical Substances (1923) |  | Gilbert Lewis and Merle Randall | 353 | ||
| The Mechanical Theory of Heat (1879) |  | Rudolf Clausius | 50 | ||
Other publications
The following are subject related articles with notable citation counts:
| # | Publication | Description | Authors | Cited by (2010) |
| "The Strength of the Weak Ties" (1973) (link) [5] | Theorized that weak social ties can be modeled as hydrogen bonds. | Mark Granovetter | 15367 | |
| What is Life? (1944) | Argued that life feeds on negative entropy. | Erwin Schrodinger | 2391 | |
| “A Model of General Economic Equilibrium” (1938) (pdf) | Derives a function φ (X, Y) related to the production of goods, based on the model of thermodynamic potentials. | John Neumann | 588 | |
| More Heat than Light: Economies as Social Physics (1989) | Historical criticism. | Philip Mirowski | 554 | |
| Thermodynamics and the Control of Biological Free-Energy Transduction (1987) | Describes how quantitative notions from physics and chemistry may be applied to biological systems, in particular those involved in biological free energy transduction. | Karel van Dam and Hans V. Westerhoff | 394 | |
| “Life as a Manifestation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics” (1994) | Uses a Hatsopoulos-Keenan-Kestin reformulated second law to argue that evolutionary structures are a result of gradients maintaining systems at some distance away from equilibrium. | Eric Schneider and James Kay | 305 | |
| Evolution, Thermodynamics, and Information (1987) | Jeffrey Wicken | 186 | ||
| The Animate and the Inanimate (1920) | William Sidis | 3 |
Discussion
The following section discusses individual books whose notability is not recognized by pure citation count. In 1967, American physical chemists Gilbert Lewis and Merle Randall's 1923 Thermodynamics and the Free Energy of Chemical Substances had come to be known as "the world's most quoted scientific book". [1] In circa 2005, independent of the previous quote, the same book was found to be the most cited reference in the reference sections to American chemical engineer Libb Thims' thermodynamics book collection, consisting of over 240 thermodynamics books.
Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger's 1944 booklet What is Life?, written for the layperson, is likely one of the most-cited books, on the subject of life and entropy, outside of the thermodynamics community. By 1989, sales of this book had well reached over 100,000 copies. [6]
Of note, the simplified 1969, 102-page, booklet Understanding Thermodynamics, by American chemical engineer Hendrick Van Ness, based on 1968 lectures to sophomore engineering students at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute during the spring term, is the highest ranking Amazon.com book on thermodynamics. [3] In addition, Van Ness’, seventh edition, 2005 Introduction to Chemical Engineering Thermodynamics, having been translated into four languages, had reached average yearly sales of 20,000 copies, with a total sales over all six editions exceeding a half-million, is “the best-selling textbook in the history of chemical engineering”. [4]
American physicist Herbert Callen's 1985 Thermodynamics: an Introduction to Thermostatistics is one of the most-cited books in the physics community (the 2006 edition being cited over 1220 times). The popularity of Callen's textbook, the second edition to his 1960 textbook Thermodynamics: an Introduction to the Physical Theories of Equilibrium Thermostatics and Irreversible Thermodynamics, is due in large part to the popularity of Callen’s 1951 paper “Irreversibility and Generalized Noise”, written with Ted A. Welton, a friend of Richard Feynman's at MIT, which by 1955 had become a “citation classic”, having been cited in over 370 publications. [2]
References
1. Angrist, Stanley W. and Helper, Loren G. (1967). Order and Chaos – Laws of Energy and Entropy, (pg. 27: "most quoted"). New York: Basic Books.
2. Staff writer. (1985). “This Week’s Citation Classic”, Current Contents, No. 1, Jan. 07.
3. Amazon sales rank: #29,554 on 11/27/08 (with 5-stars; based on 9 reviews).
4. Van Ness, Hendrick C. (2001). “Evolution of a Textbook: Introduction to Chemical Engineering Thermodynamics”, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
5. Granovetter, Mark. (1973). "The Strength of Weak Ties" (cited by 15367), American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 78, Issue 6, May 1973, pp. 1360-1380.
6. Kilmister, C.W. (1989). Schrodinger: Centenary Celebration of a Polymath (pg. 2). Cambridge University Press.
