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Identification of long‐term concept‐symbols among citations: Do common intellectual histories structure citation behavior?

“Citation classics” are not only highly cited, but also cited during several decades. We explore whether the peaks in the spectrograms generated by Reference Publication Years Spectroscopy (RPYS) indicate such long‐term impact by comparing across RPYS for subsequent time intervals. Multi‐RPYS enables us to distinguish between short‐term citation peaks at the research front that decay within 10 years versus historically constitutive (long‐term) citations that function as concept symbols. Using these constitutive citations, one is able to cluster document sets (e.g., journals) in terms of intellectually shared histories. We test this premise by clustering 40 journals in the Web of Science Category of Information and Library Science using multi‐RPYS. It follows that RPYS can not only be used for retrieving roots of sets under study (cited), but also for algorithmic historiography of the citing sets. Significant references are historically rooted symbols among other citations that function as currency.