Who Cites Whom and How It Impacts the Knowledge Production Process across Disciplines?: A Methodological Insight

ABSTRACT

This paper proposes two novel approaches to measure the similarity of co-cited authors for the task of document clustering, a) paragraph-level content-based author co-citation analysis (PCACA) and b) section-level content-based author co-citation analysis (SCACA), by mining the textual cited reference at the paragraph and the section level within a given scientific publication, respectively. Using over 2000 full-text publications, indexed in the field of Computer and Information Sciences, indexed in PLOS.org, we extract the useful information from a full-text publication such as citing sentences, location of citing sentences, cited first author name, and title of cited. We show that our proposed SCACA method of clustering outperforms existing clustering methods by exhibiting more optimal clusters with minimum graph density and an average degree in SCACA, i.e., 0.327 and 27.143, respectively. Finally, we show that SCACA produces the optimum number of clusters that comprehensively explains sub-disciplines of co-cited author pairs.

KEYWORDS:

• Author co-citation networks
• citation content analysis
• citation proximity analysis
• document clustering
• information management

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).