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

[Kevin Boyack]

It depends on the definition of research front. Your definition of 'where
the prospectors are working' is different than the definition of the
'leading edge of what has been indexed' used by most in bibliometrics. I
also note that many prospectors work the veins in producing mines.
Nevertheless, I'm sure I'm not the only one who would love to have more
information on the actual working front.

Cheers!
Kevin

-----Original Message-----
From: ASIS&T Special Interest Group on Metrics
[mailto:SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU] On Behalf Of David Wojick
Sent: Saturday, January 08, 2011 11:46 AM
To: SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU
Subject: Re: [SIGMETRICS] 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


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