How can revivals of scientific publications be explained using bibliometric methods? A case study discovering booster papers for the 1985 Physics Nobel Prize paper

The unusual citation profile of the 1985 Physics Nobel Prize paper has been analyzed. The number of citing papers per year exhibits a maximum of 123 citations in the mid-1980s and increases to more than 200 citations about two decades later. The publication set of the citing papers was analyzed in terms of co-authorships and research topics. The USA and (more recently) the People’s Republic of China appear prominently among the countries of the citing authors. A keyword analysis of the citing papers revealed research dealing with topological insulators as one of the major newly evolving research topics. An analysis of the co-cited papers has been performed via reference publication year spectroscopy (RPYS). The most-frequently co-cited papers (the peak papers of the RPYS spectrogram) were identified and discussed. As a result, we found two primary booster papers and three secondary booster papers that renewed the interest in the 1985 Physics Nobel Prize paper.