Co-citation analysis, bibliographic coupling, and direct citation: Which citation approach represents the research front most accurately?

[Kevin Boyack]

Dear colleagues - we have a new article available:

 

 

Co-citation analysis, bibliographic coupling, and direct citation: 

Which citation approach represents the research front most accurately?

 

JASIST (forthcoming); preprint self-archived at
http://www.mapofscience.com/images/pdf/SBIR_cite_preprint.pdf 

 

In the past several years studies have started to appear comparing the
accuracies of various science mapping approaches. These studies primarily
compare the cluster solutions resulting from different similarity
approaches, and give varying results. In this study, we compare the
accuracies of cluster solutions of a large corpus of 2,153,769 recent
articles from the biomedical literature (2004-2008) using four similarity
approaches: co-citation analysis, bibliographic coupling, direct citation,
and a bibliographic coupling-based citation-text hybrid approach. Each of
the four approaches can be considered as a way to represent the research
front in biomedicine, and each is able to successfully cluster over 92% of
the corpus. Accuracies are compared using two metrics - within-cluster
textual coherence as defined by the Jensen-Shannon divergence, and a new
concentration factor based on the grant-to-article linkages indexed in
MEDLINE. Of the three pure citation-based approaches, bibliographic coupling
slightly outperforms co-citation analysis using both accuracy measures;
direct citation is the least accurate mapping approach by far. The hybrid
approach improves upon the bibliographic coupling results in all respects.
We consider the results of this study to be robust given the very large size
of the corpus, and the specificity of the accuracy measures used.

 

Kevin Boyack and Dick Klavans

SciTech Strategies, Inc.

http://www.mapofscience.com/publication.html 

 

 

PS - our apologies to Dr. Loet Leydesdorff for so blatantly copying his
method and format for announcing new articles, but we feel it wise to model
best practices J

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.asis.org/pipermail/sigmetrics/attachments/20100719/f75d8710/attachment.html>