RPYS i/o: A web-based tool for the historiography and visualization of citation classics, sleeping beauties, and research fronts

TL;DR

RPYS i/o is an interactive online tool that visualizes the influence of seminal scientific works over time, aiding in understanding research histories and dynamics like citation classics and sleeping beauties.

Contribution

It introduces an online platform for performing RPYS and Multi-RPYS analyses interactively, enhancing historiography of scientific fields.

Findings

Enables exploration of influential works in research fields.

Visualizes temporal dynamics of scientific influence.

Demonstrated with references from Philosophy of Science.

Abstract

Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy (RPYS) and Multi-RPYS provide algorithmic approaches to reconstructing the intellectual histories of scientific fields. With this brief communication, we describe a technical advancement for developing research historiographies by introducing RPYS i/o, an online tool for performing standard RPYS and Multi-RPYS analyses interactively (at http://comins.leydesdorff.net/). The tool enables users to explore seminal works underlying a research field and to plot the influence of these seminal works over time. This suite of visualizations offers the potential to analyze and visualize the myriad of temporal dynamics of scientific influence, such as citation classics, sleeping beauties, and the dynamics of research fronts. We demonstrate the features of the tool by analyzing--as an example--the references in documents published in the journal Philosophy of Science.