1,518 research outputs found
RPYS i/o: A web-based tool for the historiography and visualization of citation classics, sleeping beauties, and research fronts
Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy (RPYS) and Multi-RPYS provide
algorithmic approaches to reconstructing the intellectual histories of
scientific fields. With this brief communication, we describe a technical
advancement for developing research historiographies by introducing RPYS i/o,
an online tool for performing standard RPYS and Multi-RPYS analyses
interactively (at http://comins.leydesdorff.net/). The tool enables users to
explore seminal works underlying a research field and to plot the influence of
these seminal works over time. This suite of visualizations offers the
potential to analyze and visualize the myriad of temporal dynamics of
scientific influence, such as citation classics, sleeping beauties, and the
dynamics of research fronts. We demonstrate the features of the tool by
analyzing--as an example--the references in documents published in the journal
Philosophy of Science
Introducing CitedReferencesExplorer (CRExplorer): A program for Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy with Cited References Standardization
We introduce a new tool - the CitedReferencesExplorer (CRExplorer,
www.crexplorer.net) - which can be used to disambiguate and analyze the cited
references (CRs) of a publication set downloaded from the Web of Science (WoS).
The tool is especially suitable to identify those publications which have been
frequently cited by the researchers in a field and thereby to study for example
the historical roots of a research field or topic. CRExplorer simplifies the
identification of key publications by enabling the user to work with both a
graph for identifying most frequently cited reference publication years (RPYs)
and the list of references for the RPYs which have been most frequently cited.
A further focus of the program is on the standardization of CRs. It is a
serious problem in bibliometrics that there are several variants of the same CR
in the WoS. In this study, CRExplorer is used to study the CRs of all papers
published in the Journal of Informetrics. The analyses focus on the most
important papers published between 1980 and 1990.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Journal of Informetric
Identifying single influential publications in a research field: New analysis opportunities of the CRExplorer
Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy (RPYS) has been developed for
identifying the cited references (CRs) with the greatest influence in a given
paper set (mostly sets of papers on certain topics or fields). The program
CRExplorer (see www.crexplorer.net) was specifically developed by Thor, Marx,
Leydesdorff, and Bornmann (2016a, 2016b) for applying RPYS to publication sets
downloaded from Scopus or Web of Science. In this study, we present some
advanced methods which have been newly developed for CRExplorer. These methods
are able to identify and characterize the CRs which have been influential
across a longer period (many citing years). The new methods are demonstrated in
this study using all the papers published in Scientometrics between 1978 and
2016. The indicators N_TOP50, N_TOP25, and N_TOP10 can be used to identify
those CRs which belong to the 50%, 25%, or 10% most frequently cited
publications (CRs) over many citing publication years. In the Scientometrics
dataset, for example, Lotka's (1926) paper on the distribution of scientific
productivity belongs to the top 10% publications (CRs) in 36 citing years.
Furthermore, the new version of CRExplorer analyzes the impact sequence of CRs
across citing years. CRs can have below average (-), average (0), or above
average (+) impact in citing years (whereby average is meant in the sense of
expected values). The sequence (e.g. 00++---0--00) is used by the program to
identify papers with typical impact distributions. For example, CRs can have
early, but not late impact ("hot papers", e.g. +++---) or vice versa ("sleeping
beauties", e.g. ---0000---++)
Citations: Indicators of Quality? The Impact Fallacy
We argue that citation is a composed indicator: short-term citations can be
considered as currency at the research front, whereas long-term citations can
contribute to the codification of knowledge claims into concept symbols.
Knowledge claims at the research front are more likely to be transitory and are
therefore problematic as indicators of quality. Citation impact studies focus
on short-term citation, and therefore tend to measure not epistemic quality,
but involvement in current discourses in which contributions are positioned by
referencing. We explore this argument using three case studies: (1) citations
of the journal Soziale Welt as an example of a venue that tends not to publish
papers at a research front, unlike, for example, JACS; (2) Robert Merton as a
concept symbol across theories of citation; and (3) the Multi-RPYS
("Multi-Referenced Publication Year Spectroscopy") of the journals
Scientometrics, Gene, and Soziale Welt. We show empirically that the
measurement of "quality" in terms of citations can further be qualified:
short-term citation currency at the research front can be distinguished from
longer-term processes of incorporation and codification of knowledge claims
into bodies of knowledge. The recently introduced Multi-RPYS can be used to
distinguish between short-term and long-term impacts.Comment: accepted for publication in Frontiers in Research Metrics and
Analysis; doi: 10.3389/frma.2016.0000
Heat Waves -- a hot topic in climate change research
Research on heat waves (periods of excessively hot weather, which may be
accompanied by high humidity) is a newly emerging research topic within the
field of climate change research with high relevance for the whole of society.
In this study, we analyzed the rapidly growing scientific literature dealing
with heat waves. No summarizing overview has been published on this literature
hitherto. We developed a suitable search query to retrieve the relevant
literature covered by the Web of Science (WoS) as complete as possible and to
exclude irrelevant literature (n = 6,569 papers). The time-evolution of the
publications shows that research dealing with heat waves is a highly dynamic
research topic, doubling within about 5 years. An analysis of the thematic
content reveals the most severe heat wave events within the recent decades
(1995, 2003, 2010), the cities and countries/regions affected (Australia,
United States, and Europe), and the ecological and medical impacts (drought,
urban heat islands, excess hospital admissions, and mortality). Risk estimation
and future strategies for adaptation to hot weather are major political issues.
We identified 83 citation classics which include fundamental early works of
research on heat waves and more recent works (which are characterized by a
relatively strong connection to climate change).Comment: 38 pages, 2 tables, and 9 figure
Referenced Publication Year Spectroscopy (RPYS) and Algorithmic Historiography: The Bibliometric Reconstruction of Andr\'as Schubert's {\OE}uvre
Referenced Publication Year Spectroscopy (RPYS) was recently introduced as a
method to analyze the historical roots of research fields and groups or
institutions. RPYS maps the distribution of the publication years of the cited
references in a document set. In this study, we apply this methodology to the
{\oe}uvre of an individual researcher on the occasion of a Festschrift for
Andr\'as Schubert's 70th birthday. We discuss the different options of RPYS in
relation to one another (e.g. Multi-RPYS), and in relation to the longer-term
research program of algorithmic historiography (e.g., HistCite) based on
Schubert's publications (n=172) and cited references therein as a bibliographic
domain in scientometrics. Main path analysis and Multi-RPYS of the citation
network are used to show the changes and continuities in Schubert's
intellectual career. Diachronic and static decomposition of a document set can
lead to different results, while the analytically distinguishable lines of
research may overlap and interact over time, and intermittent.Comment: Leydesdorff, L., Bornmann, L., Comins, J. A., Marx, W., & Thor, A.
(2016). Referenced Publication Year Spectrography (RPYS) and Algorithmic
Historiography: A Bibliometric Reconstruction of Andr\'as Schubert's
{\OE}uvre. In W. Gl\"anzel & B. Schlemmer (Eds.), Andr\'as Schubert--A World
of Models and Metrics (pp. 79-96). Louvain: ISS
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