Lipman is very well known for his seminal work on a series of sequence similarity algorithms, starting from the Wilbur-Lipman algorithm in 1983, FASTA search in 1985, BLAST in 1990, and Gapped BLAST and PSI-BLAST in 1997. BLAST eventually became the most widely-used and highly-cited (over 160,000 citations as of 2021) sequence alignment program in the field, and the NCBI BLAST server today is one of its most heavily used resources.