Identifying seminal books in sociology using reference publication year spectroscopy (RPYS): do the results agree with experts’ identifications?

Abstract Often, a few publications determine the fundamentals of a discipline, and these publications should be known (e.g., to recommend them to students). This study employed reference publication year spectroscopy (RPYS) to trace the historical foundations of sociology by cited references peaks in a corpus of 6518 journal papers published in 1997 and their 77,456 cited references spanning from 1800 to 2000. Building on prior RPYS applications in other disciplines, this study validated bibliometric peaks against the books nominated by sociologists in an 1997 experts’ survey. RPYS produced clear peaks in 1897 (Durkheim’s “Le Suicide”), 1934 (Mead’s “Mind, self, and society”), 1950 (Simmel’s “The sociology of Georg Simmel”), 1994 (Coleman’s “Foundations of social theory”), and 1995 (Smith’s “Nations and nationalism”). In contrast, seminal works by Max Weber, Robert K. Merton, Charles Wright Mills, Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, Pierre Bourdieu, Erving Goffman, and Jürgen Habermas did not generate distinct peaks in the spectrogram. The findings demonstrate that RPYS effectively detects works that concentrate in single reference publication years but underrepresents enduring classics with fragmented cited references. The study highlights the necessity of combining RPYS with manual variant aggregation of cited references and expert judgment to construct a meaningful map of sociology’s intellectual roots. Future research should extend RPYS by integrating advanced disambiguation algorithms to better merge cited references variants.