Co-Citation Analyses of Science: An Evaluation

Abstract

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

Citation structure of an emerging research area on the verge of application

“…The largest of the resulting fragments from the break-up of the prior dominant group is a cluster of eight papers dealing almost exclusively with n-type semiconductors, with papers originating primarily from two research labs. Such short-term disruptions have been observed in prior co-citation studies [SULLIVAN & AL., 1977;SMALL, 1977].…”

Patterns of Scholarly Communication in Information Policy: A Bibliometric Study

“…For example, Small (1977) found that immediacy rose during a 'mini-revolution' in Collagen research. Sullivan, White and Barboni (1977) demonstrated a similar phenomenon during a period of rapid theory change in the physics of weak interactions. Dean (1980) found that psychologists generally cited papers about seven years old: however, this dropped sharply during the period when additivity theory was displacing inhibitory theory äs the dominant explanation for the probability of a conditioned response.…”

Mapping of science by combined co-citation and word analysis. I. Structural aspects

“…The question has been raised whether in this way the entire specialty, or only a subgroup of publications of the specialty is identified (e.g., Sullivan et al, 1977). Small, who introduced the co-citation technique (Small, 1973), claims that the citing authors of a cluster constitute a highly relevant subgroup of the current practioners of a specialty (Small, 1977).…”