Co‐citation analysis, bibliographic coupling, and direct citation: Which citation approach represents the research front most accurately?

Abstract In the past several years studies have started to appear comparing the accuracies of various science mapping approaches. These studies primarily compare the cluster solutions resulting from different similarity approaches, and give varying results. In this study we compare the accuracies of cluster solutions of a large corpus of 2,153,769 recent articles from the biomedical literature (2004–2008) using four similarity approaches: co‐citation analysis, bibliographic coupling, direct citation, and a bibliographic coupling‐based citation‐text hybrid approach. Each of the four approaches can be considered a way to represent the research front in biomedicine, and each is able to successfully cluster over…

• NI
  National Institutes of Health