In the paper listed below, Brian Spies has done a citation analysis of papers published in various geophysics journals. There are many interesting results contained in that paper, but the one result pertinent here is that, as of the time of the analysis (~1989), the most referenced paper in the journal Geophysics for the year 1980 was my paper with Rob Greene on one-dimensional inversion methods. My guess is that the reason for the large number of citations is the fast algorithm for solving the Marchenko equation we developed in that work. That algorithm has been cited in a variety of contexts because it has applications not only to elastic wave parameter inversion, but also to the solution of various matrix inverse problems as well.

B. R. Spies, ``The effectiveness of journals in exploration geophysics,'' Geophysics 56, 844-858 (1991).