Reference publication year spectroscopy (RPYS) is a scientometrics method that consists in the study of the annual distribution of a corpus’ cited references. The method has already been used in many studies to investigate the historical roots of a research field, topic, or journal. While empirical applications are numerous, no study has yet investigated the statistical aspects of the method and especially how to deal with uncertainty or incompleteness in the data. In this methodological note, we focus on practical issues: the choice of the smoothing method for the running median at the beginning and at the end of the selected timespan, and the presence of reference publication years with zero cited references. The study is based on four datasets for influential journals in economics, management and finance, and some results are generalized using simulated data. We conclude that the “constant” smoothing method is preferable for the calculation of the running median and we discuss the implications of the different ways of dealing with years with zero citations, providing practical recommendations to researchers using RPYS.

参考文献出版年光谱法（RPYS）是一种科学计量学方法，用于研究语料库引用文献的年度分布。该方法已经在许多研究中用于调查研究领域，主题或期刊的历史根源。尽管经验应用广泛，但尚无研究调查该方法的统计方面，尤其是如何处理数据中的不确定性或不完整性。在此方法论注释中，我们关注于实际问题：在所选时间段的开始和结束时为运行中位数选择平滑方法，以及存在零引用参考文献的参考出版年。这项研究基于针对经济，管理和金融领域有影响力期刊的四个数据集，并使用模拟数据概括了一些结果。我们得出结论，“恒定”平滑方法是计算运行中位数的首选方法，并且我们讨论了以零引文处理年份的不同方法的含义，为使用RPYS的研究人员提供了实用建议。