Which are the influential publications in the Web of Science subject categories over a long period of time? CRExplorer software used for big-data analyses in bibliometrics

Abstract

What are the landmark papers in scientific disciplines? Which papers are indispensable for scientific progress? These are typical questions which are of interest not only for researchers (who frequently know the answers – or guess to know them) but also for the interested general public. Citation counts can be used to identify very useful papers since they reflect the wisdom of the crowd – in this case, the scientists using published results for their research. In this study, we identified with recently developed methods for the program CRExplorer landmark publications in nearly all Web of Science subject categories (WoS-SCs). These are publications which belong more frequently than other publications during the citing years to the top-1‰ in their subject area. As examples, we show the results of five subject categories: ‘Information Science & Library Science’, ‘Computer Science, Information Systems’, ‘Computer Science, Software Engineering’, ‘Psychology, Social’ and, ‘Chemistry, Physical’. The results of the other WoS-SCs can be found online at http://crexplorer.net . An analyst of the results should keep in mind that the identification of landmark papers depends on the used methods and data. Small differences in methods and/or data may lead to other results.