A note on reference publication year spectroscopy with incomplete information

Abstract

Reference publication year spectroscopy (RPYS) is a scientometrics method that consists in the study of the annual distribution of a corpus’ cited references. The method has already been used in many studies to investigate the historical roots of a research field, topic, or journal. While empirical applications are numerous, no study has yet investigated the statistical aspects of the method and especially how to deal with uncertainty or incompleteness in the data. In this methodological note, we focus on practical issues: the choice of the smoothing method for the running median at the beginning and at the end of the selected timespan, and the presence of reference publication years with zero cited references. The study is based on four datasets for influential journals in economics, management and finance, and some results are generalized using simulated data. We conclude that the “constant” smoothing method is preferable for the calculation of the running median and we discuss the implications of the different ways of dealing with years with zero citations, providing practical recommendations to researchers using RPYS.