Where to start reading? Introducing the reference-citation plot

With this contribution we address the problem of identifying so called key publications, i.e. publications, one should read, in order to generate an overview of a topic. To this end we introduce the reference citation plot as a useful approach for identifying such publications by plotting a paper's number of references and number of citations, respectively. The first one was chosen in order to estimate the broadness of a publication's knowledge base. This concept is perpetuated by introducing the Reference and the Citation Topic Width, which measure the disciplinary broadness of the references and of the citing papers. We demonstrate the usage of these metrics within the field of technology foresight.