What is Citation Analysis - Librarians Portal

Citation Analysis

Broadly, when one author cites another author, a relationship is established. Citation analysis uses citations in scholarly works to establish that relationship. Many different links can be ascertained, such as links between authors, between scholarly works, between journals, between fields. Citations both from and to a certain document may be studied. The Science Citation Index began publication in the year 1961.

Google's PageRank is based on the principle of citation analysis. Other bibliometrics applications include, creating thesauri, measuring term frequencies, exploring grammatical and syntactical structures of texts.

Citation analysis is the examination of the frequency, patterns, and graphs of citations in articles and books. It uses citations in scholarly works to establish acquaintances to other works or other researchers. Citation analysis is one of the most widely used methods of bibliometrics. Eg.  bibliographic coupling and co-citation are association measures based on citation analysis.

a) Co-citation Coupling: 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. Co-citation coupling is a method used to establish a subject similarity between two documents.

b) Bibliographic Coupling: Bibliographic coupling 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.

C) Co-citation Proximity Analysis or CPA is a document similarity measure that uses citation analysis to assess semantic similarity between documents at both the global document level as well as at individual section-level. The similarity measure builds on the co-citation analysis approach, but differs in that it exploits the information implied in the placement of citations within the full-texts of documents.