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

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

The evolution of the commercialization of Knowledge with New Approach of Referenced Publication Years Spectroscopy (RPYS)

The purpose of this study was to identify the most important historical works written in the field of commercialization of knowledge using Referenced Publication Years Spectroscopy (RPYS). Initial data were obtained from the Web of Science (WoS) database to investigate the historical roots of published works in the field of commercialization of knowledge. Then, the main roots of this filed, the amount of received citations, and influential works were identified using RPYS software. Next, with the help of the yearcr software, the extent of the effects of the works outside of the range of peaks were also introduced. The period under investigation is the publication in the years 1900-2015. by searching published works in the time period of 1900-2015, 1550 records related to commercialization of knowledge were retrieved. To exactly investigate the effects of this field, the timeframe was divided into five periods (four 25-year periods and one 15-year period) to allow peaks with a small number of citations in the early years. The total number of citations up to the time of the present research was 39817, which resulted in the emergence of five peaks in the years 1934, 1962, 1973, 1998, and 2003

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

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

The Historical Roots of Visual Analog Scale in Psychology as Revealed by Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy

Background: Many researchers have been using the visual analog scale (VAS) to acquire psychometric measurements from participants. Several recent studies have consistently pointed to Hayes and Patterson (1921) as the origin of the VAS method. The primary objectives of the current study were to identify the historical root of VAS by cited reference analysis and confirm if it was Hayes and Patterson (1921).Methods: The Web of Science database was searched to identify psychology papers dealing with VAS. The full records and their cited references were extracted and imported into CRExplorer for further analysis. A “reference publication year spectroscopy” (RPYS) was plotted to identify the seminal references.Results: We analyzed 32,569 references cited by 958 articles. There were 21 RPYS peaks ranging from year 1921 to 2007. We were able to identify (Hayes and Patterson, 1921) from the first peak. Furthermore, we were able to identify a total of seven seminal references that are directly relevant to VAS. Two of them were related to “graphic rating method,” three were VAS-validation studies, one was a review on the usage of VAS, and one compared reported results using VAS and Likert scale.Conclusions: Cited reference analysis with a RPYS plot succeeded in identifying and confirming (Hayes and Patterson, 1921) as the origin of VAS. This method has overcome the limitations of conventional citation analysis, namely the issues of being not indexed, not identified by pre-defined search keywords, and not being all-time most cited