Discovering seminal works with marker papers

Robin Haunschild,Werner Marx

doi:10.1007/s11192-020-03358-z

Abstract

Bibliometric information retrieval in databases can employ different strategies. Commonly, queries are performed by searching in title, abstract and/or author keywords (author vocabulary). More advanced queries employ database keywords to search in a controlled vocabulary. Queries based on search terms can be augmented with their citing papers if a research field cannot be curtailed by the search query alone. Here, we present another strategy to discover the most important papers of a research field. A marker paper is used to reveal the most important works for the relevant community. All papers co-cited with the marker paper are analyzed using reference publication year spectroscopy (RPYS). For demonstration of the marker paper approach, density functional theory is used as a research field. Comparisons between a prior RPYS on a publication set compiled using a keyword-based search in a controlled vocabulary and three different co-citation RPYS analyses show very similar results. Similarities and differences are discussed.

Highlights

Information retrieval in databases can be performed using different routes
The number of cited reference (NCR) curves indicate how many cited references were published in a specific reference publication year (RPY)
Haunschild et al (2016a) started from a keyword search in index terms of the CAplus database while the reference publication year spectroscopy (RPYS)-CO analyses performed in this study are based on papers co-cited with one marker paper in a citation database

Summary

Introduction

Searches are performed via search terms (author vocabulary) in the full-text or in certain sections of a paper (e.g., title, abstract, and/or author keywords). Searches in author vocabulary often require a strategy which is called “interactive query formulation” and was extensively discussed by Wacholder (2011). This strategy was applied for example in Haunschild et al (2016b) and Wang et al (2014) to analyze the literature about climate change. Haunschild et al (2016a) used a rather concise search query in the controlled vocabulary of CAplusSM to analyze the literature

Methods

Results

Conclusion