  We introduce a new tool - the CitedReferencesExplorer (CRExplorer,
www.crexplorer.net) - which can be used to disambiguate and analyze the cited
references (CRs) of a publication set downloaded from the Web of Science (WoS).
The tool is especially suitable to identify those publications which have been
frequently cited by the researchers in a field and thereby to study for example
the historical roots of a research field or topic. CRExplorer simplifies the
identification of key publications by enabling the user to work with both a
graph for identifying most frequently cited reference publication years (RPYs)
and the list of references for the RPYs which have been most frequently cited.
A further focus of the program is on the standardization of CRs. It is a
serious problem in bibliometrics that there are several variants of the same CR
in the WoS. In this study, CRExplorer is used to study the CRs of all papers
published in the Journal of Informetrics. The analyses focus on the most
important papers published between 1980 and 1990.
