Scientometrics
Volume/Issue:
Volume 91: Issue 2
The proximity of co-citation
Authors:
Shengbo Liu WISE Lab, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China

Search for other papers by Shengbo Liu in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed Close
and
Chaomei Chen College of Information Science and Technology, Drexel University, 3141 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-2875, USA chaomei.chen@drexel.edu

Search for other papers by Chaomei Chen in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed Close
Pages:
495–511
Online Publication Date:
20 Dec 2011
Publication Date:
01 May 2012
Article Category:
Research Article
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-011-0575-7
Keywords:
Co-citation proximity; Co-citation analysis; Citation contextual; PubMed Central
Restricted access

Abstract

Traditional co-citation analysis has not taken the proximity of co-cited references into account. As long as two references are cited by the same article, they are retreated equally regardless the distance between where citations appear in the article. Little is known about what additional insights into citation and co-citation behaviours one might gain from studying distributions of co-citation in terms of such proximity. How are citations distributed in an article? What insights does the proximity of co-citation provide? In this article, the proximity of a pair of co-cited reference is defined as the nearest instance of the co-citation relation in text. We investigate the proximity of co-citation in full text of scientific publications at four levels, namely, the sentence level, the paragraph level, the section level, and the article level. We conducted four studies of co-citation patterns in the full text of articles published in 22 open access journals from BioMed Central. First, we compared the distributions of co-citation instances at four proximity levels in journal articles to the traditional article-level co-citation counts. Second, we studied the distributions of co-citations of various proximities across organizational sections in articles. Third, the distribution of co-citation proximity in different co-citation frequency groups is investigated. Fourth, we identified the occurrences of co-citations at different proximity levels with reference to the corresponding traditional co-citation network. The results show that (1) the majority of co-citations are loosely coupled at the article level, (2) a higher proportion of sentence-level co-citations is found in high co-citation frequencies than in low co-citation frequencies, (3) tightly coupled sentence-level co-citations not only preserve the essential structure of the corresponding traditional co-citation network but also form a much smaller subset of the entire co-citation instances typically considered by traditional co-citation analysis. Implications for improving our understanding of underlying factors concerning co-citations and developing more efficient co-citation analysis methods are discussed.

  • Siddharthan, A., & Teufel, S. (2007). Whose idea was this, and why does it matter? Attributing scientific work to citations. In Proceedings of NAACL/HLT-07.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Bradshaw, B 2002 Reference directed indexing: Indexing scientific literature in the context of its use Northwestern University Evanston.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Callahan, A, Hockema, S, Eysenbach, G 2010 Contextual cocitation: Augmenting cocitation analysis and its applications. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 61 6 1130–1143.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Chen, C 2004 Searching for intellectual turning points: Progressive knowledge domain visualization. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 101 suppl 1 5303–5310 .

    • Crossref
    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Chen, C 2006 CiteSpace II: Detecting and visualizing emerging trends and transient patterns in scientific literature. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 57 3 359–377 .

    • Crossref
    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Chen, C., Zhang, J., Zhu, W., & Vogeley, M. (2007). Delineating the citation impact of scientific discoveries. In Proceedings of the 7th ACM/ IEEE-CS joint conference on digital libraries (pp. 19–28). Vancouver: ACM.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Chen, C, Song, IY, Yuan, XJ, Zhang, J 2008 The thematic and citation landscape of data and knowledge engineering (1985–2007). Data & Knowledge Engineering 67 2 234–259 .

    • Crossref
    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Elkiss, A, Shen, S, Fader, A, Gunes, E, States, D, Radev, DR 2008 Blind men and elephants: What do citation summaries tell us about a research article?. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 59 1 51–62 .

    • Crossref
    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Gipp, B., & Beel, J. (2009). Citation Proximity Analysis (CPA)—A new approach for identifying related work based on co-citation analysis. Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Scientometrics and Informetrics (pp. 571–575). Leuvuen: International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Hirsch, JE 2005 An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 102 46 16569–16572 .

    • Crossref
    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Liu, S., & Chen, C. (2011). The effects of co-citation proximity on co-citation analysis. In E. Noyons, P. Ngulube, & J. Leta (eds.), Proceedings of ISSI 2011-The 13th International Conference on Scientometrics and Informetrics (pp. 474–484), Durban, 4-7 July 2011.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Marshakova, IV 1973 System of document connections based on references. Nauchno-Tekhnicheskaya Informatsiya 2 6 3–8.

  • Qiaozhu, M., & Xiang, Z.C. (2008). Generating impact-based summaries for scientific literature. Proceedings of ACL’08 (pp. 816–824). Columbus: ACL.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Nakov, P.I., Schwartz, A.S., & Hearst, M.A. (2004). In Citances: Citation sentences for semantic analysis of bioscience text. SIGIR 2004Workshop on Search and Discovery in Bioinformatics, Sheffield: SIGIR.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Nanba, H, Okumura, M 1999 Towards multi-paper summarization using reference information. The 16th international joint conference on artificial intelligence IJCAI Stockholm 926–931.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Nanba, H., & Okumura, M. (2005). Automatic detection of survey articles. The Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (pp. 391–491). Berlin: ECDL.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Qazvinian, Vahed, Radev, DR 2008 Scientific paper summarization using citation summary networks. Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics Association for Computational Linguistics Stroudsburg 689–696.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Mohammad, S., Dorr, B., Egan, M., Hassan, A., Muthukrishan, P., Qazvinian, V., Radev, D., & Zajic, D. (2009). Using citations to generate surveys of scientific paradigms. Proceedings of Human Language Technologies: The 2009 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (pp. 584–592). Boulder: Association for Computational Linguistics.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Small, H 1973 Co-citation in the scientific literature: A new measure of the relationship between two documents. Journal of the American Society for Information Science 24:265–269 .

    • Crossref
    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Small, H. (1979). Co-citation context analysis: The relationship between bibliometric structure and knowledge. Proceedings of the ASIS Annual Meeting. (pp. 270–275). Medford: Information Today.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Small, H. (2010). Interpreting maps of science using citation context sentiments: A preliminary investigation. Scientometrics. doi: .

  • Small, H, Greenlee, E 1986 Collagen research in the 1970s. Scientometrics 10 1–2 95–117 .

  • Small, H, Sweeney, E 1985 Clustering the science citation index using co-citations.1. A comparison of methods. Scientometrics 7 3–6 391–409 .

  • Collapse
  • Expand
Cover Scientometrics
Scientometrics
Print ISSN:
0138-9130
Online ISSN:
1588-2861

To see the editorial board, please visit the website of Springer Nature.

Manuscript submission: http://www.editorialmanager.com/scim/

For subscription options, please visit the website of Springer Nature.

Scientometrics
Language English
Size B5
Year of
Foundation		 1978
Volumes
per Year		 1
Issues
per Year		 12
Founder Akadémiai Kiadó
Founder's
Address		 H-1117 Budapest, Hungary 1516 Budapest, PO Box 245.
Publisher Akadémiai Kiadó
Springer Nature Switzerland AG
Publisher's
Address		 H-1117 Budapest, Hungary 1516 Budapest, PO Box 245.
CH-6330 Cham, Switzerland Gewerbestrasse 11.
Responsible
Publisher		 Chief Executive Officer, Akadémiai Kiadó
ISSN 0138-9130 (Print)
ISSN 1588-2861 (Online)

Monthly Content Usage

Abstract Views Full Text Views PDF Downloads
Nov 2024 31 0 0
Dec 2024 32 0 0
Jan 2025 66 0 0
Feb 2025 48 0 0
Mar 2025 42 0 0
Apr 2025 12 0 0
May 2025 4 0 0