Investigation into the development and historical roots of collection development by referenced publication year spectroscopy

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this study is the application of a recently developed quantitative method named Referenced Publication Year Spectroscopy (RPYS) in the spectrum of Collection Development. RPYS portrays peak years to be recognized in citations in a research field that guarantees to assist in the identification of significant contributions and groundbreaking revelations in a research field. Design/methodology/approach Preliminary data of the study has been extracted from Web of Science (WoS) by using two phrases “collection development” and “collection building” to search in terms of the topic (comprising four parts: title, abstract, author keywords and KeyWords Plus). The search was restricted to the time period 1974-2017, which formulated a data set of 1,682 documents covering 29,017 cited references. The program CRExplorer (www.crexplorer.net) was used for the extraction of cited references from the data sets downloaded from WoS. Further analysis was performed manually using MS-Excel 2016. Findings The present study identified seminal works, which contributed to a high extent to the evolution and development of collection development. The analysis of all cited references using the RPYS method showed nine peaks, which present historical roots of collection development and revealed that the basic idea of this very subfield of library science dates centuries back. Moreover, the results of the investigation on most effective documents (in the form of peaks) revealed that the field of collection development significantly influenced by the works of authors such as Gabriel Naudé, Gabriel Peignot, Giulio Petzholdt, P L Gross, E M Gross, Richard Trueswell, Allen Kent, Ross Atkinson, etc. Practical implications The analysis of works cited in publications helps to ascertain important intellectual contributions related to a particular domain of knowledge. It not only helps in extracting the most important works but also it helps to reconstruct the history of a specific research field by examining the specific role of the cited references. Therefore, the results of the study could be useful for researchers, practitioners, scholars and more specifically bibliophiles, bibliographers and librarians to gain a better understanding of seminal works in the spectrum of collection development. Originality/value To the best of authors’ knowledge, the present research work is unique and novel in the spectrum of collection development, which explored and examined the pivotal works in the field by using the RPYS method.

Rainer Willi Bussmann’s scholarly impact: a scientometric review

“…In scientific publications, the researcher(s) refer to previous studies, this relationship between present studies and past studies reflect some basic significance between the citing article and the cited article (Chen 2018;Malik & Ahmadi 2020). Marx et al (2014) introduced reference publication year spectroscopy (RPYS), which can be used to answer this question.…”

Detecting seminal research contributions to the development of ethnobotany by reference publication year spectroscopy (RPYS)

“…This method has also been used to determine the inclination of journals (Ballandonne 20120199, Haunschild et al 2019b). Further, it has also been used to trace the historical origins of various fields like Higgs boson (Barth et al 2014), density functional theory (Haunschild et al 2019a), climate change research (Marx et al 2017), health equity (Yao et al 2019), solar energy meteorology (SEM) (Scheidsteger and Haunschild 2019), academic efficiency assessments (Rhaiem and Bornmann 2018), gustatory perception (Yeung 2017), citation analysis (Hou 2017), global positioning system (GPS) (Comins and Hussey 2015b), tribology (Elango et al 2016), Collection Development (Malik and Ahmadi 2020) and knowledge management (KM) (Khasseh and Mokhtarpour 2016).…”