Page 169 - DLIS401_METHODOLOGY_OF_RESEARCH_AND_STATISTICAL_TECHNIQUES

Methodology of Research and Statistical Techniques

Notes and definitions of co-citation coupling and bibliographic coupling, which are specific kinds of
citation analysis.
When one author cites another author, a relationship is established. Citation analysis uses
citations in scholarly works to establish links. Many different links can be ascertained, such
as links between authors, between scholarly works, between journals, between fields, or
even between countries. Citations both from and to a certain document may be studied. One
very common use of citation analysis is to determine the impact of a single author on a
given field by counting the number of times the author has been cited by others. One
possible drawback of this approach is that authors may be citing the single author in a
negative context (saying that the author doesn’t know what s/he’s talking about, for instance)
(Osareh 1996).
Co-citation Coupling
Co-citation coupling is a method used to establish a subject similarity between two documents.
If papers A and B are both cited by paper C, they may be said to be related to one another,
even though they don’t directly cite each other. If papers A and B are both cited by many other
papers, they have a stronger relationship. The more papers they are cited by, the stronger their
relationship is.
Bibliographic Coupling
Bibliographic coupling operates on a similar principle, but in a way it is the mirror image of
co-citation coupling. Bibliographic coupling links two papers that cite the same articles, so
that if papers A and B both cite paper C, they may be said to be related, even though they
don’t directly cite each other. The more papers they both cite, the stronger their relationship
is.
Web Applications of Bibliometrics

Recently, a new growth area in bibliometrics has been in the emerging field of webmetrics, or
cybermetrics as it is often called. Webmetrics can be defined as using of bibliometric techniques
in order to study the relationship of different sites on the World Wide Web. Such techniques
may also be used to map out (called “scientific mapping” in traditional bibliometric research)
areas of the Web that appear to be most useful or influential, based on the number of times
they are hyperlinked to other Web sites.

Self Assessment

Multiple Choice Questions:
5. ........................ describes the frequency of publication by authors in a given field.

(a) Bradford’s law (b) Lotka’s law
(c) Zipf’s law.
6. ........................ serves as a general guideline to librarians in determining the number of
core journals in any given field.
(a) Lotka’s law (b) Zipf’s law
(c) Bradford’s law.
7. ........................ is often used to predict the frequency of words within a text.
(a) Zipf’s law (b) Bradford’s law
(c) Lotka’s law.

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