If had not been read & noticed the importance of Williard Gibbs' (Gibbs' Free Energy which started the science of "Physical Chemistry") article by James Clerk Maxwell, therefore most probably that utmost important scientific article would have been fully forgotten forever in Yale Unv archives !?
You know, RG is interesting and fun, but it is certainly not a replacement for actual databases and libraries. Therefore RG metrics like its score and also other common social media denominators like the number of comments are definitely no meaningful indices of actual relevance. For that reason, a historic paper missing in RG is not a measure of lack of quality.
Having said that, for being a good physicochemist you should know what the Gibbs Free Energy is and how to use it which you can both learn from modern day textbook which is probably more accessible to most people and it also includes corrections and improvements which have been made to concepts. What part of the whole thing was derived by Gibbs and how he formulated it may be interesting [and helpful for the next science pub quiz], but not having read the original does not reduce your general qualification as a scientist.
It is indeed possible that good scientific works are forgotten/overlooked because they were published in an odd journal, not in English language, or because they were considered impractical/useless at the time of their publication. I found more than once that some “useless” old publications became quite useful after applying modern computational methods (which had not been available 100 years ago).
I urge you all to provide comprehensive lists of references in your publications and to occasionally read some old textbooks.
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