Introducing CitedReferencesExplorer (CRExplorer): A program for reference publication year spectroscopy with cited references standardization

Abstract

We introduce a new toolthe CitedReferencesExplorer (CRExplorer, www.crexplorer.net)which can be used to disambiguate and analyze the cited references (CRs) of a publication set downloaded from the Web of Science (WoS). The tool is especially suitable to identify those publications which have been frequently cited by the researchers in a field and thereby to study for example the historical roots of a research field or topic. CRExplorer simplifies the identification of key publications by enabling the user to work with both a graph for identifying most frequently cited reference publication years (RPYs) and the list of references for the RPYs which have been most frequently cited. A further focus of the program is on the standardization of CRs. It is a serious problem in bibliometrics that there are several variants of the same CR in the WoS. In this study, CRExplorer is used to study the CRs of all papers published in the Journal of Informetrics. The analyses focus on the most important papers published between 1980 and 1990.

Global Warming and Tea Production—The Bibliometric View on a Newly Emerging Research Topic

“…crexplorer.net) [22,23]. In this study, we determined which references have been most frequently cited by the papers in our publication set on climate change and tea production.…”

“…The CRExplorer offers the possibility to cluster and merge variants of the same cited reference [22,23]. Clustering the reference variants by considering volume and page numbers and subsequent merging aggregated only 5 out of 5507 cited references.…”

Further steps in integrating the platforms of WoS and Scopus: Historiography with HistCite™ and main-path analysis

“…CRExplorer was developed for disambiguation of the cited references (Thor; Marx; Bornmann, 2016aBornmann, , 2016b. The program detects variants of the same cited reference, clusters them, and merges their occurrences.…”

The Role of Climate in the Collapse of the Maya Civilization: A Bibliometric Analysis of the Scientific Discourse

“…Questions regarding the historical context of research fields or specific research topics can be answered by using a bibliometric method called Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy (RPYS) [26] Climate 2017, 5, 88 5 of 22 in combination with a recently developed program named CRExplorer [27][28][29]. In this study we determined, which references have been most frequently cited by the papers in our publication set and whether comparatively highly-cited early references (citations classics) exist.…”

“…CRExplorer offers the possibility to cluster and merge variants of the same cited reference [27,28]. Automatic clustering (without considering volume and page numbers due to the large portion of cited books) and subsequent merging of 2084 variants of the same cited references provided the initial data basis (for more information on using the CRExplorer see its handbook at [27]).…”