Discovering seminal works with marker papers

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method using marker papers and co-citation analysis to identify seminal works in a research field, demonstrated through density functional theory.

Contribution

It presents a new strategy combining marker papers with RPYS to discover important publications, complementing existing bibliometric retrieval methods.

Findings

Marker paper approach effectively identifies key works.

RPYS-CO results align with keyword-based searches.

Method reveals influential papers in DFT research.

Abstract

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.