Co‐citation in the scientific literature: A new measure of the relationship between two documents
Abstract
A new form of document coupling called co‐citation is defined as the frequency with which two documents are cited together. The co‐citation frequency of two scientific papers can be determined by comparing lists of citing documents in the Science Citation Index and counting identical entries. Networks of co‐cited papers can be generated for specific scientific specialties, and an example is drawn from the literature of particle physics. Co‐citation patterns are found to differ significantly from bibliographic coupling patterns, but to agree generally with patterns of direct citation. Clusters of co‐cited papers provide a new way to study the specialty structure of science. They may provide a new approach to indexing and to the creation of SDI profiles.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Co-citation analysis can be used in authors and/or publications order to track and study the relationship between authors, topics, journals or keywords.
“Co-citation analysis can be used in authors and/or publications order to track and study the relationship between authors, topics, journals or keywords (Small 1973;Pilkington and Liston Heyes 1999).”
From Big Data and supply chain management: A review and bibliometric analysis (2018) · cites this paper as Small 1973
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Flagged first, then by citations
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- Authors
- Small, H.
- Corresponding author
- Small, Henry
- ORCID
- Small, Henry
- Venue
- Journal of the American Society for Information Science
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 1973-07
- Volume
- 24
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 265-269
- ISSN
- 0002-8231 (ISSN-L)
- 1097-4571
- OpenAlex
- W2005207065
- Cited by
- 5,345
- References
- 9
- Citations by year
- 2026: 413 · 2025: 466 · 2024: 467 · 2023: 522 · 2022: 569 · 2021: 421 · 2020: 357 · 2019: 275 · 2018: 209 · 2017: 156 · 2016: 158 · 2015: 144 · 2014: 123 · 2013: 111 · 2012: 117
- FWCI
- 9.57
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Journal of the American Society for Information Science (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- Drexel University
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty › scientometrics and bibliometrics research
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Web visibility and informetrics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Library Science and Information
- Keywords
- co-citation analysis, bibliographic coupling, citation analysis, citation patterns, Science Citation Index, subject indexing
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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