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A note on reference publication year spectroscopy with incomplete information

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Abstract

Reference publication year spectroscopy (RPYS) is a scientometrics method that consists in the study of the annual distribution of a corpus’ cited references. The method has already been used in many studies to investigate the historical roots of a research field, topic, or journal. While empirical applications are numerous, no study has yet investigated the statistical aspects of the method and especially how to deal with uncertainty or incompleteness in the data. In this methodological note, we focus on practical issues: the choice of the smoothing method for the running median at the beginning and at the end of the selected timespan, and the presence of reference publication years with zero cited references. The study is based on four datasets for influential journals in economics, management and finance, and some results are generalized using simulated data. We conclude that the “constant” smoothing method is preferable for the calculation of the running median and we discuss the implications of the different ways of dealing with years with zero citations, providing practical recommendations to researchers using RPYS.

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Notes

  1. Available at http://www.leydesdorff.net/software/rpys/. Accessed February 17th, 2021.

  2. CRExplorer procedure is detailed in the manual of the software (Thor et al. 2018). We could not find a description of this behavior in the official documentation of bibliometrix package, so we report what is our understanding of the source code.

  3. CRExplorer’s approach has been communicated to us by its developers. For bibliometrix package, we could not find a description of the process in the official documentation, so we report what is our understanding of the source code.

  4. The code for the two simulations is available upon request.

  5. For each journal, we collected as much data as our inhouse access to Web of Science permitted. The number of documents per journal are: QJE (1334), JF (3108), ECON (1946), JMS (2050). We uploaded the datasets in CRExplorer and exported the data on number of citations per publication year for further analysis.

  6. Thor et al. 2018 also suggest splitting the analysis in different consecutive and non-overlapping periods, although for simplifying the interpretation of the spectrogram.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Lutz Bornmann and Andreas Thor for discussions about the topic of this note. We are also indebted to Lutz Bornmann for his comments and suggestions on previous versions of the manuscript. We are also very grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on previous drafts

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  1. ESSCA School of Management, 1 rue Joseph Lakanal, 49003, Angers, France

    Matthieu Ballandonne & Igor Cersosimo

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  1. Matthieu Ballandonne
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Correspondence to Matthieu Ballandonne.

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Ballandonne, M., Cersosimo, I. A note on reference publication year spectroscopy with incomplete information. Scientometrics 126, 4927–4939 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-03976-1

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