Measuring Citation Impact of Bose's Paper Planck's Law and the Light Quantum Hypothesis

Abstract

This paper presents an overview of the most recent citation pattern in S.N. Bose's work on Planck's formula derivation and light quantum hypothesis, with a special focus on geographical distribution of citations received by him. This work is a quantitative assessment of the relevance and influence of the highly cited paper of the scientist under study and intends to ascertain from the number of citations received by Bose in later day publications. The main aim of this work is to assess how far pioneering S.N. Bose was and to trace how much perpetual quality has the derivation of Planck's formula, results and the value of results. Different potential source materials or tools such as Science Citation Index (SCI: five yearly cumulated hardcopy volumes) from 1945 onwards in the National Library of India in Calcutta, Websites including citation databases like Google Scholar etc. online have been consulted to prepare a citation history to his paper. The paper under study was further searched for citations as per Web of Science (SCI -online database) ranging from 1900 up to and including January, 2022. It can be concluded that a comparison may be made of the work of peer researchers in similar fields who have been bringing out for a wide range of time periods. But the distribution of citations limits their usefulness to pointing out the acuteness. Many a time delayed citations are not easily traceable as they occur highly scattered or via intermediary citations i.e. citing a source within a source (citing a secondary source of publication) that in turn cites the original. Furthermore, the time gap of the work of Bose and evidences in support of his interpretations is so large that the core (actual) citations to his fundamental works couldn't be detected.