Introducing CitedReferencesExplorer (CRExplorer): A program for Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy with Cited References Standardization

TL;DR

CRExplorer is a tool that disambiguates and analyzes cited references from Web of Science data, helping researchers identify influential publications and study the historical development of research fields.

Contribution

The paper introduces CRExplorer, a novel software for standardizing and analyzing cited references to facilitate bibliometric studies and historical analysis.

Findings

Identifies key publications in informetrics from 1980-1990

Standardizes variant cited references in WoS data

Highlights influential references through frequency analysis

Abstract

We introduce a new tool - the CitedReferencesExplorer (CRExplorer, www.crexplorer.net) - which can be used to disambiguate and analyze the cited references (CRs) of a publication set downloaded from the Web of Science (WoS). The tool is especially suitable to identify those publications which have been frequently cited by the researchers in a field and thereby to study for example the historical roots of a research field or topic. CRExplorer simplifies the identification of key publications by enabling the user to work with both a graph for identifying most frequently cited reference publication years (RPYs) and the list of references for the RPYs which have been most frequently cited. A further focus of the program is on the standardization of CRs. It is a serious problem in bibliometrics that there are several variants of the same CR in the WoS. In this study, CRExplorer is used to study the CRs of all papers published in the Journal of Informetrics. The analyses focus on the most important papers published between 1980 and 1990.