Almost exactly 20 years ago I wrote a paper with Yanan Fan on how sample quantiles are computed in statistical software. It was cited 43 times in the first 10 years, and 457 times in the next 10 years, making it my third paper to receive 500+ citations. So what happened in 2006 to suddenly increase the citations? I think it was a combination of things: I wrote a new quantile() function (with Ivan Frohne) which made it into R …