Which early works are cited most frequently in climate change research literature? A bibliometric approach based on Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy

Werner Marx,Andreas Thor,Lutz Bornmann,Robin Haunschild

doi:10.1007/s11192-016-2177-x

Abstract

This bibliometric analysis focuses on the general history of climate change research and, more specifically, on the discovery of the greenhouse effect. First, the Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy (RPYS) is applied to a large publication set on climate change of 222,060 papers published between 1980 and 2014. The references cited therein were extracted and analyzed with regard to publications, which are cited most frequently. Second, a new method for establishing a more subject-specific publication set for applying RPYS (based on the co-citations of a marker reference) is proposed (RPYS-CO). The RPYS of the climate change literature focuses on the history of climate change research in total. We identified 35 highly-cited publications across all disciplines, which include fundamental early scientific works of the nineteenth century (with a weak connection to climate change) and some cornerstones of science with a stronger connection to climate change. By using the Arrhenius (Philos Mag J Sci Ser 5(41):237–276, 1896) paper as a RPYS-CO marker paper, we selected only publications specifically discussing the discovery of the greenhouse effect and the role of carbon dioxide. Using different RPYS approaches in this study, we were able to identify the complete range of works of the celebrated icons as well as many less known works relevant for the history of climate change research. The analyses confirmed the potential of the RPYS method for historical studies: Seminal papers are detected on the basis of the references cited by the overall community without any further assumptions.

Highlights

Climate change has gained strongly increasing attention in the natural sciences and more recently in the social and political sciences
Bibliometrics as a rapidly developing quantitative method is useful for research assessment purposes, and e.g. for analyzing the history of science. This bibliometric analysis focuses on the history of climate change research: Which are the early works that are still alive in recent climate change related publications in the form of most frequently cited references and are most important for the evolution of this research field? On whose shoulders do the publishing authors stand and which are the origins or intellectual roots? Such questions can be answered by using a bibliometric method called Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy (RPYS, see Marx et al 2014)
In this study we present the results of the RPYS and RPYS-CO on climate change research (1) based on the total number of references (n = 10,932,050) cited within a carefully searched publication set of papers most relevant for this research field (n = 222,060) as well as (2) based only on the co-cited references of a single paper (n = 1658)

Summary

Introduction

Climate change has gained strongly increasing attention in the natural sciences and more recently in the social and political sciences. RPYS is based on the assumption that peers produce a useful database by their publications, in particular by the references cited therein This database can be analysed statistically with regard to the works most relevant for their specific field of research. Several publications have appeared, in which the RPYS was described and applied to examine the origins of research fields (Marx and Bornmann 2014; Barth et al 2014; Leydesdorff et al 2014; Comins and Hussey 2015a, b) Compared to these studies, our analysis is based on a very large publication and reference set. We reveal the decisive works in this context, including the forerunners and the papers taking up the impetus given by Arrhenius

Results

Stommel

Discussion

Conclusions