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

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. IntroductionScience mapping has reached the point where it is no longer a primarily academic venture but instead is being driven by and used for practical purposes. Although such mapping is often equated with visual representations of the structure of science, the visuals are only a reflection of the layout and partitioning of bibliographic units (e.g., documents, words, authors, journals) that are the primary output of the mathematics behind the mapping. The partitions themselves, along with detailed analysis of the partitions, are typically of far more interest to decision-makers than are visuals of the structure. The accuracy of these partitions becomes very important, especially when these maps are used for real-world problems of research planning and evaluation.Our work over the past several years has been aimed specifically at creating ever more detailed (Klavans & Boyack, 2010) We recently completed a study for the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) in which we compared science maps generated from a single large corpus (2.15 million documents published from 2004-2008) using 13 different similarity approaches, including three citation-based approaches, nine text-based approaches, and one hybrid approach. The ultimate application of this science mapping effort for the NIH will be for portfolio planning and analysis; any time science mapping has the potential to become commingled with funding and decision making, the map must be as accurate as possible. Thus, our study was focused on determining how to generate the most accurate large-scale map of the medical science literature for portfolio analysis applications.In any study of accuracy, the question of how to m...

Human Computer Interaction Research Through the Lens of a Bibliometric Analysis

“…In essence, the number of co-coupled documents defines the strength of links and association (Boyack & Klavans, 2010). Following this technique, the bibliographic coupling data is analysed through a software computation (BibExcel) to generate a matrix comprised of the BGC frequency (Persson, Danell, & Schneider, 2009).…”

Scientometric Analysis of the Researches About Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge and Scholarly Communication

“…Bilimetrik verilere dayalı görselleştirme yöntemleri bilimsel çalışmaların meta verilerinden faydalanarak matematiksel ilişkilere dayalı örüntüleri ortaya çıkarmayı hedeflemektedir (Boyack ve Klavans, 2010;Klavans ve Boyack, 2011). Bilimsel ilişkilerin değerlendirilmesinde en sık başvurulan meta veri atıf bilgisidir.…”

Visualization and analysis of SCImago Journal & Country Rank structure via journal clustering

“…As seen in Figure 1, journal multi-assignment is not too high: over 60% of journals were assigned to a single subject category; almost 30% were assigned to two categories; just over 9% to three categories; and a residual percentage of journals were assigned to four categories. The challenge of validating cluster solutions based on a comparison of different types of citation links -namely, direct citation, co-citation and coupling-has been faced in the past (Klavans and Boyack, 2006;Boyack and Klavans, 2010;Klavans and Boyack, 2016). Still, further analysis and evidence is needed to identify the most accurate citation-based link proposal.…”