ASIAN JOURNAL OF CHEMISTRY ASIAN JOURNAL OF CHEMISTRY https://doi.org/10.14233/ajchem.2018.20949 INTRODUCTION Two chapters entitled “of the mechanical origin of corrosiveness” and “of the mechanical origin of corrodibility” by Robert Boyle in 1675 were considered the origin of corro- sion research [1]. In the beginning of 19 th century, the whole subject of corrosion was observed an electrochemical pheno- menon [2]. The corrosion of ammonium nitrite [3], diazo solutions [4], brasses [5], iron and steel [6] were paid attention. The research on the corrosion of brasses in 1907 received an award granted by the American Electrochemical Society [5]. The Technical Committee on Corrosion, the forerunner of the Corrosion Division of electrochemical society, was formed in 1921 [7]. In 1930s, important symposia “inhibitors, corrosion and pH, corrosion of alloys and influence of cathodic reactions on corrosion” were presented [7]. Pourbaix [8] introduced ther- modynamics in corrosion studies and potential-pH diagrams, now known as Pourbaix Diagram [9]. The emergence of new electrochemical and non-electrochemical techniques for the study of corrosion reactions and corrosion products greatly accelerated during the 1970s and has continued to the present day [10]. Some outstanding scholars e.g., Tammann, Evans, Wagner, Pourbaix, Ulig, Fontana and Hackerman greatly advanced corrosion research [1]. INVITED ARTICLE Highly Cited Articles of Corrosion Research in Science Citation Index Expanded HUI-ZHEN FU 1,* and YUH-SHAN HO 2 1 Department of Information Resources Management, School of Public Affairs, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058, Zhejiang, P.R. China 2 Trend Research Centre, Asia University, Taichung 41354, Taiwan *Corresponding author: Fax: +886 4 2330 5834; Tel: +886 4 2332 3456 ext. 1797; E-mail: huizhen.927@163.com Received: 31 July 2017; Accepted: 28 October 2017; Published online: 28 February 2018; AJC-18769 This study aimed to identify and analyze the characteristics of the highly cited articles published in corrosion related fields in the Science Citation Index Expanded from 1900 to 2012. Articles that have been cited more than 100 times since publication to 2012 (TC2012 ≥ 100) were assessed. Analyzed aspects concerned the publication patterns of decades, journals, categories, institution, country and citation life cycles. Citations in the first two years after publication (TC2), in 2012 (C2012) and since publication to 2012 (TC2012) and citations per year of each article (TCPY) were innovatively used to characterize the citation patterns. Most of the articles were published in 1990s and 2000s. Corrosion Science, Journal of the Electrochemical Society, Corrosion and Electrochimica Acta were the core journals. Corrosion research is mainly published in technology and physical sciences research areas and multidisciplinary materials science, metallurgy and metallurgical engineering, electrochemistry and coatings and films materials categories. Seven industrialized countries: the USA, Germany, UK, France, Japan, Canada and Italy played an important role. In addition, the relation of citations with time and impact factor has been revealed. Keywords: Corrosion, SCI-Expanded, Bibliometric, Top-Cited Articles, Citation, Web of Science. Asian Journal of Chemistry; Vol. 30, No. 4 (2018), 703-710 A bibliometrics method was previously employed to evaluate scientific production of corrosion papers from 1992 to 2007, giving the panorama of global corrosion research [11]. This study focused on the highly cited corrosion-related articles for more than one hundred years of 1900-2012. Highly cited articles [12], also called most frequently cited articles [13], most cited papers [14], citation classics [15] and top cited papers [16], are intellectual tours and force with quite minimal technology [17]. The bibliometrics analyses of highly cited articles could help reveal the recognition of scientific advance- ment and to give a historic perspective on the scientific progress [18,19]. The research of highly cited articles could be dated back to a series of studies in 1970s by Garfield [12,13,20]. Most of the early research of highly cited articles just identify and list the basic information with few discussion, such as authors, title and published year of them [21,22]. Recently, scientists employ multi-dimensional indicators and methods to provide more comprehensive characteristics of highly cited articles. Total citations of a paper has been widely applied to be a bibliometric indicator [23,24], while a newly developed indicator, total number of citations of an article from its publi- cation to recent year, was presented [25,26] to overcome the limitations of the former [27]. Indicators such as numbers of authors cited, numbers of institutions cited, numbers of countries