In this study, the historical roots of tribology are investigated using a newly developed scientometric method called Referenced Publication Years Spectroscopy. The study is based on cited references in tribology research publications. The Science Citation Index Expanded is used as data source. The results show that RPYS has the potential to identify the important publications : Most of the publications which have been identified in this study as highly cited (referenced) publications are landmark publications in the field of tribology.
New research usually evolves on the basis of previous investigations and discussions among the experts in a specific scientific community. Although there are many differences between the theories about scientific development (see e.g. Popper, 1961 andKuhn, 1962), the relationship of current research to past literature always plays a significant role: knowledge cannot be acquired without the references to the past (Bornmann, de Moya Anegón & Leydesdorff 2010). Although the past literature plays a significant role in every research field, their importance is seldom studied using scientometric techniques and data. Thus, Marx et al. (2014) introduced the method "Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy (RPYS)" to reveal the important historical publications in a research field. The RPYS is able to identify the historical roots of research fields and can quantify their citation impact on current research. The method is based on analyzing the frequencies with which references are cited in the publications of a specific research field in terms of the publication years of the cited references. According to Marx and Bornmann (2014), RPYS can not only be applied to the identification of historical roots, but also to unveil scientific legends in a scientific field.
This study is intended to identify the historical roots of the tribology research from the perspective of the cited references. The term tribology was coined by Jost (1966) deriving from the Greek word tribos (or triben) means rubbing. Tribology is the science and technology of two interacting surfaces in relative motion and of related subjects and practices. Tribology is a multidisciplinary field which incorporates a number of disciplines, including mechanical engineering, material science, mechanics, surface chemistry, and surface physics. According to a report of the South African Institute of Tribology, tribology is a property of matter or the second most important field of study of material property after that of gravity.
The results of the RPYS for the tribology field is based on the Science Citation Index -Expanded (SCI-E, Thomson Reuters). The study is mainly concerned with the analysis of the reference publication years (RPYs) and especially with the analysis of early publications cited particularly frequently as the historical roots of tribology research. In order to analyze the RPYs, the following steps have been employed with the program rpys.exe (see http://www. leydesdorff.net/software/rpys/ and Bornmann et al. in press ).
The 1 st step is to select the publications on tribology in the SCI-E database and to extract all bibliographical records. The 2 nd step is to extract all references from the records using rpys.exe and to identify the most important historical RPYs for the tribology research field.
The 3 rd step is to identify the most important publications in specific RPYs using the program yearcr.exe. The program RefMatchCluster.jar has been employed to aggregate cited references across misspellings and variants.
The 4 th step is to establish the frequency distribution of cited references over the RPYs and to determine the publications cited most frequently in early RPYs.
The publications on tribology were selected in the SCI-E database by searching in the title, abstract, author keywords and keywords plus fields with the following keywords (date of search: May 2015): tribolog OR “tribosyst*” OR “tribo-syst*” OR “tribo-chem*” OR “tribochem*” OR “tribotechn*” OR “tribo-physi*” OR “tribophysi*” (Elango et al. 2015;Elango et al. in press). An overview of the data set used in this study is provided in Table 1. 1) and heat map (see Figure 2).
) recommend to calculate quantile values in order to compare the importance of different RPYs. For the calculation, the formula given by Hazen (1914) is employed:
Quantile = ((i-0.5)/n * 100),
Where i is the rank of a specific RPY (years are ranked in decreasing order by their number of cited references) and n the total number of RPYs. The quantile values are available in median.dbf generated by rpys.exe. The higher the quantile value for a specific RPY, the most frequently referenced literature (cited) from that RPY (compared to other RPYs).
The distribution of the number of references cited in the tribology literature is presented in The term “tribology” was introduced by Jost (1966), so that the year 1966 which might be seen as the starting point of the modern tribology research. The RPYs are grouped into two periods of investigation, i.e. 1801-1900 and 1901-1965, based on the following remarks: (i) the 19 th century was an era of rapidly accelerating scientific discovery and invention with significant developments in the fields of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, electricity, and metallurgy. The developments laid the groundwork for the technological advances of the 20 th century. With the RPYs, we expect to find basic literature in the historical science which is also impo
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