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MACA: a modified author co-citation analysis method combined with general descriptive metadata of citations

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Abstract

Author co-citation analysis (ACA) is a well-known and frequently-used method to exhibit the academic researchers and the professional field sketch according to co-citation relationships between authors in an article set. However, visualizing subtle examination is limited because only author co-citation information is required in ACA. The proposed method, called modified author co-citation analysis (MACA), exploits author co-citation relationship, citations published time, citations published carriers, and citations keywords, to construct MACA-based co-citation matrices. According to the results of our experiments: (1) MACA shows a good clustering result with more delicacy and more clearness; (2) more information involved in co-citation analysis performs good visual acuity; (3) in visualization of co-citation network produced by MACA, the points in different categories have far more distance, and the points indicating authors in the same category are closer together. As a result, the proposed MACA is found that more detailed and subtle information of a knowledge domain analyzed can be obtained, compared to ACA.

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Notes

  1. Its name was Journal of the American Society for Information Science before 2001. Nevertheless, this journal changed its name to Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology in 2014.

  2. This is the URL of Y. Ding’s personal website: http://info.ils.indiana.edu/~dingying.

  3. This is the URL of L. Bornmann’s personal website: http://www.lutz-bornmann.de.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank two research assistants in our group, Binglu Wang and Chengyue Gong, for their kind help on part of data collections and preliminary author-filtering. We are also very grateful for the constructive comments and helpful suggestions from the anonymous reviewers and the editor in chief of Scientometrics, Dr. Wolfgang Glänzel.

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Correspondence to Win-bin Huang.

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Bu, Y., Liu, Ty. & Huang, Wb. MACA: a modified author co-citation analysis method combined with general descriptive metadata of citations. Scientometrics 108, 143–166 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-1959-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-1959-5

Keywords

Mathematics Subject Classification

JEL Classification

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