Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis

Nees Jan van Eck and Ludo Waltman

ERIM Report Series Research in Management from Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM), ERIM is the joint research institute of the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University and the Erasmus School of Economics (ESE) at Erasmus University Rotterdam

Abstract: We provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.

Keywords: Pearson correlation; author cocitation analysis; cosine; information science; similarity measure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C19 M M11 R4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-12-13
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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