DETECTING THE HISTORICAL ROOTS OF RESEARCH FIELDS BY REFERENCE PUBLICATION YEAR SPECTROSCOPY (RPYS)

Scientific progress is almost always based on historical predecessors who have already provided important contributions to the new research field. However, it is rather difficult to identify historical roots in a systematic manner and to the best knowledge of the authors there is no method available which can be used independently of the research field. In this paper we introduce a new quantitative method to determine the historical roots of research fields and to quantify their impact on current research. Our method is based on the frequency of citations within a specific research field as a function of the publication year. Major historical contributions appear as more or less pronounced peaks, depending on the total number of citations within this research field. In most cases, these peaks are caused by high citation rates of individual historical publications. In analogy to spectroscopy which shows physical phenomena as peaks in a spectrum we have named our new method reference publication year spectroscopy (RPYS). In this study, we use research on graphene (a recently prepared new material) to illustrate how RPYS functions and what results it can deliver.