We introduce a new tool – the CitedReferencesExplorer (<a href="http://www.crexplorer.net">CRExplorer</a>) –
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.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2016.02.005
