Revolutions in science: The proposal of an approach for the identification of most important researchers, institutions and countries based on co-citation reference publication year spectroscopy exemplified at research on physical modelling of Earth's climate

Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy (RPYS) is a bibliometric method originally introduced to reveal the historical roots of research topics or fields. RPYS does not identify the most highly cited papers of the publication set being studied (as is usually done by bibliometric analyses in research evaluation), but instead it indicates most frequently referenced publications - each within a specific reference publication year. In this study, we propose to use the method to identify important researchers, institutions, and countries in the context of breakthrough research. To do so, we focus on research on physical modeling of Earth's climate and the prediction of global warming as an example. Klaus Hasselmann (KH) and Syukuro Manabe (SM) were both honoured with the Nobel Prize in 2021 for their fundamental contributions to research on physical modeling of Earth's climate and the prediction of global warming. Our results reveal that RPYS is able to identify most important researchers, institutions, and countries. In our example, all the relevant authors' institutions are located in the United States. These institutions are either research centers of two US National Research Administrations (NASA and NOAA) or universities: the University of Arizona, Princeton University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the University of Stony Brook. The limitations of our approach to identify important researchers, institutions, and countries in the context of breakthrough research are discussed.