Co-cited author retrieval and relevance theory: examples from the humanities

Howard D. White ()
Additional contact information
Howard D. White: Drexel University

Scientometrics, 2015, vol. 102, issue 3, No 30, 2275-2299

Abstract: Abstract Given a user-selected seed author, a unique experimental system called AuthorWeb can return the 24 authors most frequently co-cited with the seed in a 10-year segment of the Arts and Humanities Citation Index. The Web-based system can then instantly display the seed and the others as a Pathfinder network, a Kohonen self-organizing map, or a pennant diagram. Each display gives a somewhat different overview of the literature cited with the seed in a specialty (e.g., Thomas Mann studies). Each is also a live interface for retrieving (1) the documents that co-cite the seed with another user-selected author, and (2) the works by the seed and the other author that are co-cited. This article describes the Pathfinder and Kohonen maps, but focuses much more on AuthorWeb pennant diagrams, exhibited here for the first time. Pennants are interesting because they unite ego-centered co-citation data from bibliometrics, the TF*IDF formula from information retrieval, and Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory (RT) from linguistic pragmatics. RT provides a cognitive interpretation of TF*IDF weighting. By making people’s inferential processes a primary concern, RT also yields insights into both topical and non-topical relevance, central matters in information science. Pennants for several authors in the humanities demonstrate these insights.

Keywords: Author co-citation analysis; Bibliometric visualizations; Cognitive information science; Pennant diagrams; Relevance; TF*IDF weighting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-014-1483-4 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:scient:v:102:y:2015:i:3:d:10.1007_s11192-014-1483-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11192

DOI: 10.1007/s11192-014-1483-4

Access Statistics for this article

Scientometrics is currently edited by Wolfgang Glänzel

More articles in Scientometrics from Springer, Akadémiai Kiadó
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().