Boyack, KW; Klavans, R. 2010. Co-Citation Analysis, Bibliographic Coupling, and Direct Citation: Which Citation Approach Represents the Research Front Most Accurately?. JASIST. 61 (12): 2389-2404

[Eugene Garfield]

Boyack, KW; Klavans, R. 2010. Co-Citation Analysis, Bibliographic Coupling, and 
Direct Citation: Which Citation Approach Represents the Research Front Most 
Accurately?. JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE 
AND TECHNOLOGY 61 (12): 2389-2404.

Author Full Name(s): Boyack, Kevin W.; Klavans, Richard
Language: English
Document Type: Article
KeyWords Plus: COMBINING FULL-TEXT; SCIENCE; DOCUMENTS; 
CLASSIFICATION; MAPS

Abstract: 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 
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 concentration measure 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.

Addresses: [Boyack, Kevin W.] SciTech Strategies Inc, Albuquerque, NM 87122 
USA; [Klavans, Richard] SciTech Strategies Inc, Berwyn, PA 19312 USA

Reprint Address: Boyack, KW, SciTech Strategies Inc, Albuquerque, NM 87122 
USA.

E-mail Address: kboyack at mapofscience.com; rklavans at mapofscience.com
ISSN: 1532-2882
DOI: 10.1002/asi.21419
fulltext: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.21419/abstract