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

TL;DR

This study uses bibliometric methods, including Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy (RPYS) and RPYS-CO, to identify the most influential early works and key publications in the history of climate change research from 1800 to 2014.

Contribution

It introduces a new subject-specific bibliometric approach, RPYS-CO, to better identify seminal publications related to climate change and greenhouse effect discovery.

Findings

Identified 35 highly-cited foundational publications in climate change research.

Demonstrated the effectiveness of RPYS and RPYS-CO in uncovering influential historical works.

Confirmed that seminal papers can be detected through citation analysis without prior assumptions.

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 19th century (with a weak connection to climate change) and some cornerstones of science with a stronger connection to climate change. By using the Arrhenius (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. Also, we focused on the time period 1800-1850 to reveal the contributions of J.B.J Fourier in terms of cited references. 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.