Comments on author cocitation analysis theory and methods. By entering Pearson's r's into multidimensional scaling and clustering routines, the author shows that, despite r's fluctuations, clusters based on it are much the same for the combined groups as for the separate groups. The combined groups when mapped appear as polarized clumps of points…

John Swales's 1986 article "Citation analysis and discourse analysis" was written by a discourse analyst to introduce citation research from other fields, mainly sociology of science, to his own discipline. Here, I introduce applied linguists and discourse analysts to citation studies from information science, a complementary tradition not…

Discussion of author cocitation analysis focuses on Pathfinder Networks (PFNET) where nodes represent authors and links represent weighted paths between nodes, the weights being cocitation counts. Highlights include remapping information science; comparison with principal components analysis; a correlation-based PFNET; and AuthorLink, a Web-based…

Presents an extensive domain analysis of information science in terms of its authors. Names of those most frequently cited in 12 key journals from 1972 through 1995 were retrieved from Social Scisearch via DIALOG. The top 120 were submitted to author co-citation analyses, yielding automatic classifications relevant to histories of the field.…

Describes study that compared and judged the quality of subject indexing in online bibliographic databases. Documents from medical behavioral science literature are used with terms drawn from MEDLINE, PsychINFO, BIOSIS, and Excerpta Medica. Comparative statistics are presented on how each database links related documents and discriminates among…

Explores the tendency of authors to re-cite themselves and others in multiple works over time, using the insights gained to build citation theory. Defines the set of all authors whom an author cites as that author's citation identity. As illustrated by the top re-citees of the eight information scientists selected as test cases, identities are…

Describes the design and implementation of a prototype visualization system, AuthorLink, to enhance author searching. AuthorLink is based on author co-citation analysis and visualization mapping algorithms. AuthorLink produces interactive author maps in real time from a database of 1.26 million records supplied by the Institute for Scientific…