Telling the story of solar energy meteorology into the satellite era by applying (co-citation) reference publication year spectroscopy

Studying the history of research fields by analyzing publication records and topical and/or keyword searches with reference publication year spectroscopy (RPYS) has been introduced as a powerful tool to identify the corresponding root publications. However, for some research fields (e.g., rather new and interdisciplinary fields) like solar energy meteorology, encompassing such research fields via a keyword- or topic-based search query is not feasible to get a reasonably exhaustive publication set. Therefore, we apply its variant RPYS-CO to all publications co-cited with two highly important marker papers, using the cited references explorer for inspecting the RPYS-CO results. We obtain two lists of seminal papers, which are able to adequately tell us the story of solar energy meteorology up to the 1990s, respectively in its subfield using satellite-based methods for solar irradiance estimation even to very recent years. Consequently, we recommend this method to gain valuable insights in (new) research fields.