A
examines academic papers that have never been cited. According to author Richard Van Noorden, by some estimates up to half of all papers have yet to receive their first citation 5 years after publication, and even 10% of Nobel Prizewinners' papers go uncited. However, Van Noorden reports that these estimates are far too high. For recent papers indexed on Web of Science (WoS), "records suggest that fewer than 10%" remain uncited, and even this is likely an overestimate, because it doesn't track citations from journals outside WoS, not to mention books, patents, etc. As for Nobelist's papers, it seems that just 0.3% are uncited. The proportion of uncited papers does seem to have been higher in the past, however, with 20% of WoS papers published in 1980 remaining without a single citation today. So uncited papers do exist, but they're uncommon, and getting rarer - probably ...
