2014/02/17 by Andreas Barth, Werner Marx, Barth, Andreas +5
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Digital Libraries (cs.DL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #History and Philosophy of Physics (physics.hist-ph) #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions #cs.DL #hep-ph #physics.hist-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1402.4223
openalex publication_date 2014/02/17 · arxiv created 2014/04/29 · arxiv updated 2014/04/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Subject of our present paper is the analysis of the origins or historical roots of the Higgs boson research from a bibliometric perspective, using a segmented regression analysis in a reference publication year spectroscopy (RPYS). Our analysis is based on the references cited in the Higgs boson publications published since 1974. The objective of our analysis consists of identifying concrete individual publications in the Higgs boson research context to which the scientific community frequently had referred to. As a consequence, we are interested in seminal works which contributed to a high extent to the discovery of the Higgs boson. Our results show that researchers in the Higgs boson field preferably refer to more recently published papers - particular papers published since the beginning of the sixties. For example, our analysis reveals seven major contributions which appeared within the sixties: Englert and Brout (1964), Higgs (1964, 2 papers), and Guralnik et al. (1964) on the Higgs mechanism as well as Glashow (1961), Weinberg (1967), and Salam (1968) on the unification of weak and electromagnetic interaction. Even if the Nobel Prize award highlights the outstanding importance of the work of Peter Higgs and Francois Englert, bibliometrics offer the additional possibility of getting hints to other publications in this research field (especially to historical publications), which are of vital importance from the expert point of view.