方法对比

	Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy (RPYS)	Author Co-Citation Analysis (ACA)
领域	文献计量学	文献计量学
方法族	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
起源年份	2014	1981
提出者	Werner Marx, Lutz Bornmann, Andreas Barth & Loet Leydesdorff	Howard D. White & Belver C. Griffith; later Howard D. White & Katherine W. McCain
类型	Cited-reference temporal analysis pipeline for historical roots	Science-mapping pipeline using authors as units of analysis
开创性文献	Marx, W., Bornmann, L., Barth, A., & Leydesdorff, L. (2014). Detecting the historical roots of research fields by reference publication year spectroscopy (RPYS). Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 65(4), 751-764.	White, H. D., & Griffith, B. C. (1981). Author cocitation: A literature measure of intellectual structure. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 32(3), 163-171.
别名	RPYS, Cited-Reference Spectroscopy, Historical Roots Detection	ACA, Author Co-Citation Mapping, Cited-Author Co-Citation Analysis
相关	3	3
摘要	Reference publication year spectroscopy (RPYS) detects the historical roots of a research field by analyzing not the field's own publications but the publication years of the works those publications cite. Introduced by Werner Marx, Lutz Bornmann, Andreas Barth, and Loet Leydesdorff in 2014, RPYS aggregates all cited references across a corpus, counts how many reference the literature of each past year, and plots the resulting spectrum. Seminal works leave a distinctive mark: the years in which they appeared show up as sharp peaks rising above the smooth background of routine citation. By detecting these peaks — using the deviation of each year's count from a running median — and then inspecting which highly cited references produced them, RPYS pinpoints the foundational papers and books on which a field was built, providing a quantitative, citation-based historiography.	Author co-citation analysis (ACA) maps the intellectual structure of a research field by treating authors, rather than documents, as the units of analysis. Introduced by Howard White and Belver Griffith in 1981, ACA rests on a simple premise: when two authors are repeatedly cited together in the same later papers, the community of citers is signaling that their work is intellectually related. By counting these co-citations across a body of literature, assembling them into an author-by-author matrix, converting that matrix into similarities, and projecting it into a low-dimensional map, ACA recovers the 'specialties' or schools of thought that organize a discipline and shows how they relate to one another. White and McCain's 1998 study of information science, which mapped 120 leading authors over more than two decades, became the canonical demonstration of the method and established its workflow.