Which are the influential publications in the Web of Science subject categories over a long period of time? CRExplorer software used for big-data analyses in bibliometrics

TL;DR

This paper identifies landmark publications across various Web of Science categories using CRExplorer, highlighting influential papers through citation analysis over time.

Contribution

It introduces a method using CRExplorer software to systematically identify influential publications in nearly all WoS subject categories.

Findings

Landmark papers are identified as top-per-mill in citations within their categories.

Results are exemplified for three specific categories.

The approach can be applied across all WoS categories and results are publicly available.

Abstract

What are the landmark papers in scientific disciplines? On whose shoulders does research in these fields stand? Which papers are indispensable for scientific progress? These are typical questions which are not only of interest for researchers (who frequently know the answers - or guess to know them), but also for the interested general public. Citation counts can be used to identify very useful papers, since they reflect the wisdom of the crowd; in this case, the scientists using the published results for their own research. In this study, we identified with recently developed methods for the program CRExplorer landmark publications in nearly all Web of Science subject categories (WoSSCs). These are publications which belong more frequently than other publications across the citing years to the top-per mill in their subject category. The results for three subject categories "Information Science and Library Science", "Computer Science, Information Systems", and "Computer Science, Software Engineering" are exemplarily discussed in more detail. The results for the other WoSSCs can be found online at http://crexplorer.net.