An ongoing discussion concerning the possibilities of universal classification based on phenomena rather than on research disciplines has been noticed. In order to discover if this was a limited discussion or the beginning of a major new field of research a study of citations was made using the database Web of Science. In addition, references of the works concerned were studied to find out where the ideas originated. The study of references shows that the ideas originate in a limited number of older published works, some of them well established in Information Science, some of them less generally known. The main ideas commonly used in Information Science are Ranganathan?s facet theories and the work of the Classification Research Group.