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Cited by 785

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 26 of the 26 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Requirements for a cocitation similarity measure, with special reference to Pearson's correlation coefficient

Ahlgren, Per, Jarneving, Bo, Rousseau, Ronald·2003·Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
DOI 10.1002/asi.10242
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Abstract

Author cocitation analysis (ACA), a special type of cocitation analysis, was introduced by White and Griffith in 1981. This technique is used to analyze the intellectual structure of a given scientific field. In 1990, McCain published a technical overview that has been largely adopted as a standard. Here, McCain notes that Pearson's correlation coefficient (Pearson's r) is often used as a similarity measure in ACA and presents some advantages of its use. The present article criticizes the use of Pearson's r in ACA and sets forth two natural requirements that a similarity measure applied in ACA should satisfy. It is shown that Pearson's r does not satisfy these requirements. Real and hypothetical data are used in order to obtain counterexamples to both requirements. It is concluded that Pearson's r is probably not an optimal choice of a similarity measure in ACA. Still, further empirical research is needed to show if, and in that case to what extent, the use of similarity measures in ACA that fulfill these requirements would lead to objectively better results in full‐scale studies. Further, problems related to incomplete cocitation matrices are discussed.

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Metadata

Authors
Ahlgren, P., Jarneving, B., & Rousseau, R.
Venue
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Publisher
Wiley
Published
2003-02-25
Volume
54
Issue
6
Pages
550-560
ISSN
  • 1532-2882 (ISSN-L)
  • 1532-2890
DOI
10.1002/asi.10242
OpenAlex
W2096123611
Cited by
785
References
26
FWCI
23.05
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Requirements for a cocitation similarity measure, with special reference to Pearson's correlation coefficient. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1002/asi.10242
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Ahlgren, P., Jarneving, B., & Rousseau, R. (2003). Requirements for a cocitation similarity measure, with special reference to Pearson's correlation coefficient. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.10242

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

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