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

[David Wojick]

I would think these clustering methods were useful in finding the research 
body, not the front, as it were. By the time attention clusters the front 
has already passed. It is like the difference between prospectors and 
miners. These clusters show us where the producing mines are, not where the 
prospectors are working.

David

At 01:05 PM 1/8/2011, you wrote:
>Adminstrative info for SIGMETRICS (for example unsubscribe):
>http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/sigmetrics.html
>
>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