Identification and analysis of the historical origins of ergonomics by referenced publication year's spectroscopy

Every scientific activity needs to needs to know the previous related scientific activities so that its various aspects can be better investigated in order to obtain a richer intellectual heritage. So this article aims to identify and analyze the historical origins of ergonomics using two scientometric techniques named RPYS and RPYS-Co.

This applied research was conducted in a scientometrics method. The research data consists of 31239 articles in the field of Ergonomics which are indexed over the 20-year period (2000-2019) in the web of science database. After extracting all the references of these articles, the results were analyzed using the CRExplorer software.

Results showed that in the field of ergonomics, from 1700 to 2000, a total of 19 mutations occurred in the two periods of 1900-1700 and 2000-1900. The article "the information capacity of the human motor system in controlling the amplitude of movement" by Fitts (1954) was recognized as an outstanding and index work. According to RPYS-CO results the most co-citations with index work are related to the works of 1997 and 2004, which are on Fitts Law.

In the period of 1700 to1900 influential works were related to the field of psychology, biology and economics, and in the period of 1900-2000 influential works were related to the field of psychological theories, work environment and research methodology.