For the past several years, Henry Small and collaboratorsl have been arguing strongly on behalf of the utility of a technique called 'co-citation analysis' as a tool for understanding the specialty structure of science. Data which we have collected over the past two years on a specialty in elementary particle physics, the study of weak interactions,2 allow an evaluation of co-citation analysis, and we report the results in this Note.A series of claims for the technique of co-citation analysis have been made by Small and his colleagues. The first and most important claim is that co-citation clusters 'reflect the ... cognitive structures of research specialties.' 3 A second claim is that the 'current population of publishing specialists is ... the group of citing authors for the cluster.'4 In other words, by using the Science Citation Index (SCI) to identify a cluster of papers which are then held to represent a narrow subject matter grouping or specialty, one can get back to the population of authors in the specialty as a whole by discovering who cites at least one pair of the papers in the cluster for a given year. A third claim, related to the second, is that 'using the same thresholds each year the growth of the specialty can be gauged in terms of the growth of the clusters 5 at The University of Iowa Libraries on June 8, 2015 sss.sagepub.com Downloaded from

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An examination, primarily through citation analysis, is made of the changing interdependence of theory and experiment in a specialty within particle physics, the physics of weak interactions, during a period of rapid intellectual development. Lakatos' notions of how theory and experiment should be related during 'progressive' and 'stagnating' periods are used as guides for the analysis. At the conclusion a suggestion is offered as to the way in which Lakatos' categories might best be used in empirical research.

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