Influential cited references in FEMS Microbiology Letters: lessons from Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy (RPYS)

The journal FEMS Microbiology Letters covers all aspects of microbiology including virology. On which scientific shoulders do the papers published in this journal stand? Which are the classic papers used by the authors? We aim to answer these questions in this study by applying the Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy (RPYS) analysis to all papers published in this journal between 1977 and 2017. In total, 16 837 publications with 410 586 cited references are analyzed. Mainly, the studies published in the journal FEMS Microbiology Letters draw knowledge from methods developed to quantify or characterize biochemical substances such as proteins, nucleic acids, lipids, or carbohydrates and from improvements of techniques suitable for studies of bacterial genetics. The techniques frequently used for studying the genetic of microorganisms in FEMS Microbiology Letters' studies were developed using samples prepared from microorganisms. Methods required for the investigation of proteins, carbohydrates, or lipids were mostly transferred from other fields of life science to microbiology

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---++)

The geography of references in elite articles: What countries contribute to the archives of knowledge

This study is intended to find an answer for the question on which national "shoulders" the worldwide top-level research stands. Traditionally, national scientific standings are evaluated in terms of the number of citations to their papers. We raise a different question: instead of analyzing the citations to the countries' articles (the forward view), we examine referenced publications from specific countries cited in the most elite publications (the backward-citing-view). "Elite publications" are operationalized as the top-1% most-highly cited articles. Using the articles published during the years 2004 to 2013, we examine the research referenced in these works. Our results confirm the well-known fact that China has emerged to become a major player in science. However, China still belongs to the low contributors when countries are ranked as contributors to the cited references in top-1% articles. Using this perspective, the results do not point to a decreasing trend for the USA; in fact, the USA exceeds expectations (compared to its publication share) in terms of contributions to cited references in the top-1% articles. Switzerland, Sweden, and the Netherlands also are shown at the top of the list. However, the results for Germany are lower than statistically expected

Climate Change Research in View of Bibliometrics

This bibliometric study of a large publication set dealing with research on climate change aims at mapping the relevant literature from a bibliometric perspective and presents a multitude of quantitative data: (1) The growth of the overall publication output as well as (2) of some major subfields, (3) the contributing journals and countries as well as their citation impact, and (4) a title word analysis aiming to illustrate the time evolution and relative importance of specific research topics. The study is based on 222,060 papers published between 1980 and 2014. The total number of papers shows a strong increase with a doubling every 5-6 years. Continental biomass related research is the major subfield, closely followed by climate modeling. Research dealing with adaptation, mitigation, risks, and vulnerability of global warming is comparatively small, but their share of papers increased exponentially since 2005. Research on vulnerability and on adaptation published the largest proportion of very important papers. Research on climate change is quantitatively dominated by the USA, followed by the UK, Germany, and Canada. The citation-based indicators exhibit consistently that the UK has produced the largest proportion of high impact papers compared to the other countries (having published more than 10,000 papers). The title word analysis shows that the term climate change comes forward with time. Furthermore, the term impact arises and points to research dealing with the various effects of climate change. Finally, the term model and related terms prominently appear independent of time, indicating the high relevance of climate modeling.Comment: 40 pages, 6 figures, and 4 table