Revolutions in science: The proposal of an approach for the identification of most important researchers, institutions, and countries based on Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy (RPYS)

TL;DR

This paper introduces an adaptation of Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy (RPYS) to identify key researchers, institutions, and countries driving breakthrough research, demonstrated through climate modeling studies and Nobel laureates.

Contribution

It proposes a novel application of RPYS for research evaluation, focusing on identifying influential entities in scientific breakthroughs.

Findings

RPYS successfully identified key researchers and institutions in climate modeling.

The method highlighted US-based institutions as central to the research.

RPYS can reveal historically significant contributors aligned with Nobel Prize winners.

Abstract

RPYS is a bibliometric method originally introduced in order to reveal the historical roots of research topics or fields. RPYS does not identify the most highly cited papers of the publication set being studied (as is usually done by bibliometric analyses in research evaluation), but instead it indicates most frequently referenced publications - each within a specific reference publication year. In this study, we propose to use the method to identify important researchers, institutions and countries in the context of breakthrough research. To demonstrate our approach, we focus on research on physical modeling of Earth's climate and the prediction of global warming as an example. Klaus Hasselmann and Syukuro Manabe were both honored with the Nobel Prize in 2021 for their fundamental contributions to this research. Our results reveal that RPYS is able to identify most important researchers, institutions, and countries. For example, all the relevant authors' institutions are located in the USA. These institutions are either research centers of two US National Research Administrations (NASA and NOAA) or universities: the University of Arizona, Princeton University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the University of Stony Brook.