Semantic relationships between cited and citing articles in library and information science journals

Abstract

The act of referencing another author's work in a scholarly or research paper is usually assumed to signal a direct semantic relationship between the citing and cited work. The present article reports a study that examines this assumption directly. The purpose of the research is to investigate the semantic relationship between citing and cited documents for a sample of document pairs in three journals in library and information science: Library Journal, College and Research Libraries, and Journal of the American Society for Information Science. A macroanalysis, based on a comparison of the Library of Congress class numbers assigned citing and cited documents, and a microanalysis, based on a comparison of descriptors assigned citing and cited documents by three indexing and abstracting journals, ERIC, LISA, and Library Literature, were conducted. Both analyses suggest that the subject similarity among pairs of cited and citing documents is typically very small, supporting a subjective, psychological view of relevance and a trial‐and‐error, heuristic understanding of the information search and research processes. The results of the study have implications for collection development, for an understanding of psychological relevance, and for the results of doing information retrieval using cited references. Several intriguing methodological questions are raised for future research, including the role of indexing depth, specificity, and quality on the measurement of document similarity. © 1993 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Visualizing and mapping the intellectual structure of information retrieval

“…Although ranging from 1 year of publications (Harter et al, 1993) to far more, the most common period for citation data was around 10 years. Most recently, analyses of citation data in library and information science have considered 10-year spans (Zhao & Strotmann, 2008a, 2008b, a 23-year span (Chen et al, 2010), and a roughly 30-year span (Ding et al, 2009).…”

“…In that sense, it supplements works by others who studied the literature of information retrieval (Ding et al, 2000(Ding et al, , 2009Ellis et al, 1999); the literature of library and information science (Chen et al, 2010;Cronin & Meho, 2007, 2008Donohue, 1972;Harter & Hooten, 1992;Harter et al, 1993;Persson, 1994;Rice, 1990;Tang, 2004;White, 2003;White & McCain, 1998;Åström, 2007, 2010 and its relationships with other disciplines (Borgman & Rice, 1992); the literature of other LIS subfields such as image indexing and retrieval (Chu, 2001) and human information behavior (McKechnie et al, 2005); and the literature of science in general (e.g., Small, 1999).…”

“…Some considered articles published in a single journal (e.g., Harter & Hooten, 1992;Persson, 1994) or in multiple journals (e.g., Åström, 2007, 2010Borgman & Rice, 1992;Chen et al, 2010;Cronin & Meho, 2007, 2008Ding et al, 2000;Harter et al, 1993;Rice, 1990;Tang, 2004;White, 2003;White & McCain, 1998;Zhao & Strotmann, 2008a, 2008b. Data for an early citation analysis paper in the LIS field was obtained from a set of journals that published information science-related articles produced by government-funded research programs (Donohue, 1972).…”

“…Other library and information science researchers have noted the lack of relationship between the nature of the funding that resulted in the publication of the article (whether it was funded or not) and its quality or utility (as measured by the number of subsequent citations to it) (Harter & Hooten, 1992); the negligible similarity among pairs of cited and citing articles with respect to their subjects (Harter et al, 1993); the separate, if related, nature of author research agendas in the subfields of user studies, information retrieval, and information systems (Ellis et al, 1999); and the predominantly single authorship, unusual length, and frequent self-citations of the best papers (Brooks, 2000). Cronin and Meho (2007) identified two very broad categories of innovators in information science and concluded that chronological age alone is not a predictor of intellectual innovation.…”

“…Although a number of studies have examined the literature of library and information science (e.g., Åström, 2007, 2010Chen, Ibekwe-SanJuan, & Hou, 2010;Cronin & Meho, 2007;Donohue, 1972;Harter & Hooten, 1992;Harter, Nisonger, & Weng, 1993;Persson, 1994;Rice, 1990;White & McCain, 1998;Zhao & Strotmann, 2008a, 2008b, the nature of the literature concerning information retrieval has not been so thoroughly investigated (Ding, Chowdhury, & Foo, 2000;Ding, Yan, Frazho, & Caverlee, 2009;Ellis, Allen, & Wilson, 1999). In this paper, our main goal is to visualize and map the intellectual and cognitive structures of the IR subfield.…”