Document- and Keyword-based Author Co-citation Analysis

Abstract

In the field of scientometrics, the principal purpose for author co-citation analysis (ACA) is to map knowledge domains by quantifying the relationship between co-cited author pairs. However, traditional ACA has been criticized since its input is insufficiently informative by simply counting authors’ co-citation frequencies. To address this issue, this paper introduces a new method that reconstructs the raw co-citation matrices by regarding document unit counts and keywords of references, named as Document- and Keyword-Based Author Co-Citation Analysis (DKACA). Based on the traditional ACA, DKACA counted co-citation pairs by document units instead of authors from the global network perspective. Moreover, by incorporating the information of keywords from cited papers, DKACA captured their semantic similarity between co-cited papers. In the method validation part, we implemented network visualization and MDS measurement to evaluate the effectiveness of DKACA. Results suggest that the proposed DKACA method not only reveals more insights that are previously unknown but also improves the performance and accuracy of knowledge domain mapping, representing a new basis for further studies.