Effective Prüfer angles and relative oscillation criteria

We present a streamlined approach to relative oscillation criteria based on effective Prüfer angles adapted to the use at the edges of the essential spectrum. Based on this we provided a new scale of oscillation criteria for general Sturm-Liouville operators which answer the question whether a perturbation inserts a finite or an infinite number of eigenvalues into an essential spectral gap. As a special case we recover and generalize the Gesztesy-Ünal criterion (which works below the spectrum and contains classical criteria by Kneser, Hartman, Hille, and Weber) and the well-known results by Rofe-Beketov including the extensions by Schmidt.