Discovering seminal works with marker papers
This incremental method aids researchers in bibliometric information retrieval by providing an alternative strategy to discover key papers in specific fields.
The paper tackles the problem of identifying seminal works in a research field by introducing a marker paper approach, which uses co-citation analysis with reference publication year spectroscopy (RPYS) to reveal important papers, demonstrating similar results to keyword-based methods in density functional theory (DFT).
Bibliometric information retrieval in databases can employ different strategies. Com-monly, 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 vo-cabulary. Queries based on search terms can be augmented with their citing papers if a re-search 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 (DFT) is used as a research field. Compari-sons between a prior RPYS on a publication set compiled using a keyword-based search in a controlled vocabulary and three different co-citation RPYS (RPYS-CO) analyses show very similar results. Similarities and differences are discussed.