[dvse]

These "best paper" lists are almost comical and a very poor way to find important papers. Have a look at citation statistics for the older "winners", they are only marginally better than the average for the venue - essentially nobody still reads them today and they've had hardly any impact all.

To find _important_ papers you want at least 5-10 years of hindsight - look for those that are still being cited a lot correcting for citation rings, dubious journals/conferences etc. As a side benefit, these can almost always be found online on some course website without requiring IEEE / ACM subscriptions.

[abbyroad9191]

What's happening to hackernews? While there's still a handful of insightful comments and submissions, the culture feels like it's starting to shift with everyone having their noses in the air. I'm starting to use this site less and less, and it's a shame. Oh well.

[batista]

Your rant is relevant to the insightful parent --which also provides arguments for what it says--, how exactly?

[ap22213]

How does one get a list of the most cited papers of the last 5 years? Or, see trends on how a paper has been cited? Is there a site that does this?

[dvse]

Find a semi recent advanced textbook (preferably one that is used in at least one of the better schools) and use google scholar from there (both papers cited in the text and those citing it).

The formal bibliometric tools such as scopus, reuter-thompson etc are hugely misleading to say the least with the ever growing avalanche of publications over the last decade (increasing number of people are being paid bonuses for each publication in an "international" venue). See this character who according to reuter-thompson is a "rising star" of computer science [1] and also happens to be a collaborator of El-Naschie [2].

[1] http://sciencewatch.com/inter/aut/2008/08-apr/08aprHe/

[2] http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=42...