Co-Citation Analyses of Science
An Evaluation
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11925077 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Daniel J Sullivan (0000-0001-6703-3905, Carleton College, corresponding author), Dan Sullivan (0000-0002-5649-9627, Carleton College), D Hywel White (Cornell University), Edward J Barboni (Cornell University) |
| Year | 1977 |
| Volume | 7 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 223-240 |
| Publication date | 1977-05-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Social Studies of Science (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0306-3127 • E-ISSN: 1460-3659 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/030631277700700205 |
| OpenAlex | W2015030300 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 17 |
| References cited | 2 |
For the past several years, Henry Small and collaborators1 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 cluster.'5
Citation · Citation analysis · Cluster (spacecraft · Co-citation · Data science · Epistemology · Library science · Population · Science Citation Index · Sociology · Specialty · Subject (documents · Computer Science · Demography · Philosophy · Psychology · Research Data Management Practices · Scientific Computing and Data Management · scientometrics and bibliometrics research
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| Citations per year | 0.35 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1978 - 2025 (48) |
| Highly cited | No |