There has already been a question about important papers that were initially rejected. Many of the answers were very interesting. The question is here.
My concern in this question is slightly different. In the course of a discussion I am having, the question has come up of the extent to which the perceived quality of a journal is a good reflection of the quality of its papers. The suggestion has been made that because authors tend to submit their best work to the best journals, that makes it easy for those journals to select papers that are on average of a high standard, but it doesn't necessarily solve the reverse problem — that they miss other papers that are also very important. (Note that the situation more generally in science is different, because there is a tendency for prestigious journals to value papers that make exciting claims, and not to check too hard that those claims are actually correct. So there one has errors of Type I and Type II, so to speak.)
I am therefore interested to know of examples of papers that are very important, but are published in middle-ranking journals. I am more interested in recent papers than in historical examples, since it is the current journal system that we are discussing.
Just in case it doesn't go without saying, please do not nominate a paper that you yourself have written…
Best Answer
One case in point may be
This is the paper where Frey establishes the link between modularity and Fermat's Last Theorem.