Discovering seminal works with marker papers

Bibliometric information retrieval in databases can employ different strategies. Commonly, queries are performed by searching in title, abstract and/or author keywords (author vocabulary). More advanced queries employ database keywords to search in a controlled vocabulary. Queries based on search terms can be augmented with their citing papers if a research field cannot be curtailed by the search query alone. Here, we present another strategy to discover the most important papers of a research field. A marker paper is used to reveal the most important works for the relevant community. All papers co-cited with the marker paper are analyzed using reference publication year spectroscopy (RPYS). For demonstration of the marker paper approach, density functional theory is used as a research field. Comparisons between a prior RPYS on a publication set compiled using a keyword-based search in a controlled vocabulary and three different co-citation RPYS analyses show very similar results. Similarities and differences are discussed.