My short list of the most cited papers (or Books) of

Robert Kosara

Information Visualization, Visual Analytics, InfoVis

1. Parallel sets: Interactive exploration and visual analysis of categorical data
2. Storytelling: The next step for visualization
3. Thoughts on user studies: Why, how, and when
4. Visualization criticism-the missing link between information visualization and art
5. Semantic depth of field

Jock D. Mackinlay

Visualization, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)

1. Readings in information visualization: using vision to think
2. Cone trees: Animated 3d visualizations of hierarchical information.
3. Automating the design of graphical presentations of relational information
4. The perspective wall: Detail and context smoothly integrated
5. The information visualizer, an information workspace

Ben Shneiderman

human-computer interaction, information visualization, social media

1. Designing the user interface: strategies for effective human-computer interaction
2. Readings in information visualization: using vision to think
3. The eyes have it: A task by data type taxonomy for information visualizations
4. direct manipulation: a step beyond programming languages
5. Tree-maps: A space-filling approach to the visualization of hierarchical information structures

Jeffrey Heer

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Visualization, Information Visualization, Visual Analytics

1. D3: Data-Driven Documents
2. Prefuse: a toolkit for interactive information visualization
3. Vizster: Visualizing online social networks
4. Narrative visualization: Telling stories with data
5. Crowdsourcing graphical perception: using mechanical turk to assess visualization design

Mike Bostock

Information Visualization

1. D3: Data-Driven Documents
2. Crowdsourcing graphical perception: using mechanical turk to assess visualization design
3. A tour through the visualization zoo
4. Protovis: A graphical toolkit for visualization
5. Declarative Language Design for Interactive Visualization

Arvind Satyanarayan

Data Visualization Human-Computer Interaction Interpretability Accessibility

1. The Building Blocks of Interpretability
2. Vega-Lite: A Grammar of Interactive Graphics
3. Reactive Vega: A Streaming Dataflow Architecture for Declarative Interactive Visualization
4. Lyra: An Interactive Visualization Design Environment
5. Webzeitgeist: design mining the web
6. Authoring Narrative Visualizations with Ellipsis
7. Altair: Interactive Statistical Visualizations for Python

Tamara Munzner

Visualization

1. A Nested Model for Visualization Design and Validation

Jessica Hullman

information visualization | uncertainty communication | hci

1. Visualization Rhetoric: Framing Effects in Narrative Visualization
2. A deeper understanding of sequence in narrative visualization
3. Benefitting infovis with visual difficulties

… more authors, coming soon!!