When David Autor co-wrote a paper on how computerization affects job skill demands more than 20 years ago, a journal took 18 months to consider it ' only to reject it after review. He went on to submit it to The Quarterly Journal of Economics, which eventually published the work1 in November 2003. Autor's paper is now the third most cited in policy documents worldwide, according to an analysis of data provided exclusively to Nature. It has accumulated around 1,100 citations in policy documents, show figures from the London-based firm Overton (see 'The most-cited papers in policy'), which maintains a database of more than 12 million policy documents, think-tank papers, white papers and guidelines. 'I thought it was destined to be quite an obscure paper,' recalls Autor, a public-policy scholar and economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. 'I'm excited that a lot of people are citing it.' The top ten most cited papers in policy documents are dominated by...
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