Telling the Early Story of Solar Energy Meteorology by Applying (Co-Citation) Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy

Studying the history of research fields by analyzing publication records and topical and/or keyword searches with a full Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy (RPYS) has been introduced as a powerful tool to identify the corresponding root publications. However, for a rather new and interdisciplinary research field like Solar Energy Meteorology (SEM), this method is not feasible to get a reasonably exhaustive publication set. Therefore we apply its variant RPYS-CO to all publications co-cited with one highly important marker paper, using the CRExplorer for plotting and inspecting the spectrogram of the number of cited references. Examining its peaks and their main contributing publications, we get a list of seminal papers, which are able to adequately tell us the story of SEM up to the 1990s. Generally, we recommend this method to gain valuable insights in (new) research fields.