Bibliographic coupling occurs when two works reference

Citation

Broadly, a citation is a reference to a published or unpublished source . More precisely, a citation is an abbreviated alphanumeric expression Broadly, a citation is a reference to a published or unpublished source (not always the original source). More precisely, a citation is an abbreviated...

 a common third work in their bibliographies

Bibliography

Bibliography , as a practice, is the academic study of books as physical, cultural objects; in this sense, it is also known as bibliology...

. The coupling strength is higher the more citations the two bodies have in common, and this coupling is used to extrapolate how similar the subject matter of the two works is. Bibliographic coupling is not subjectively valuable in all fields of research since it helps the researcher to find related research done in the past. A closely related notion is the co-citation index, which refers to the number of times two works are cited together in subsequent literature.

The term "bibliographic coupling" was first introduced by M. M. Kessler of MIT in a paper published in 1963, and has been embraced in the work of the information scientist Eugene Garfield

Eugene Garfield

Eugene "Gene" Garfield is an American scientist, one of the founders of bibliometrics and scientometrics. He received a PhD in Structural Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1961. Dr. Garfield was the founder of the Institute for Scientific Information , which was located in...

. Others have questioned the usefulness of the concept, pointing out that the two works may reference completely unrelated subject matter in the third.

Some examples of online sites that make use of bibliographic coupling include
The Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies and CiteSeer.IST

There was a progression of citation study methods from:

• Bibliographic coupling (1963) to
• Co-citation analysis (1973) to
• Author cocitation analysis (1981).

In 1973, Henry Small introduced what he concluded was a better indicator of subject similarity, [document] co-citation analysis..

In 1981 Howard White and Belver Griffith moved to author cocitation analysis (ACA).

For an interesting summary of this progression of the study of citations see. The paper is more like a memoir than a research paper, but it is full of decisions, research expectations, interests and motivations -- including a really great story of how Henry Small approached Belver Griffith with the idea of co-citation and they became collaborators, mapping science as a whole.

Bibliographic Coupling

• M. M. Kessler (1963), "Bibliographic coupling between scientific papers." "American Documentation", 14(1), pp. 10-25.
• M. M. Kessler (1963). "An experimental study of bibliographic coupling between technical papers." IEEE Transaction on Information Theory, 9(1) pp. 49.

Co-citation analyis

• H. G. Small (1973). "Co-citation in the scientific literature: a new measure of the relationship between two documents." Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 24, 265-269.
• H. G. Small & B. C. Griffith (1974). "The structure of scientific literatures (I) Identifying and graphing specialties." Science Studies 4(1): 17-40.
• B. C. Griffith, et al. (1974). "The structure of scientific literatures (II) Towards a macro- and micro-structure for science." Science Studies 4(4): 339-365.
• H. M. Collins (1974). "The TEA set: Tacit knowledge and scientific networks." Science Studies 4(2): 165-186.

Author Cocitation Analysis (ACA)

• H. D. White & B. C. Griffith (1981). "Author co-citation: a literature measure of intellectual structure." Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 32, 163-171.
• K. W. McCain (1986). "Co-cited author mapping as a valid representation of intellectual structure." Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 37(3): 111-122.
• Mary J. Culnan (1987). "Mapping the intellectual structure of MIS, 1980-1985: A co-citation analysis." MIS Quarterly, 11(3): 341-353. ACM
• K. W. McCain (1990). "Mapping authors in intellectual space: a technical overview." Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 41(6): 433-443.
• D. L. Hoffman & M. B. Holbrook (1993). "The intellectual structure of consumer research: A bibliometrics study of author co-citations in the first 15 years of the journal of consumer research." Journal of Consumer Research, 19, 505-517.
• Sean B. Eom (1996). "Mapping the intellectual structure of research in decision support systems through author cocitation analysis (1971-1993)." Decision Support Systems, 16(4): 315-338. ACM

Citation Studies in a More General Context

• H. G. Small (1978). "Cited Documents as Concept Symbols," Social Studies of Science, vol.8, p.327-340. http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/small/hsmallsocstudsciv8y1978.pdf
• H. G. Small (1982). "Citation context analysis." In: Brenda Dervin
  Brenda Dervin
  Brenda Dervin, currently a professor of communication at Ohio State University, is a researcher in the communication and library and information science fields. Her research about information seeking and information use led to the development of the Sense-Making approach...
  
   and M. J. Voigt, eds., Progress in Communication Sciences, volume 3, pp. 287–310. Ablex Publishing, 1982.
• David C. Blair
  David Blair (information technologist)
  David C. Blair is Professor of Business Information Technology at Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. He received Ph.D. from the University Of California, Berkeley, and M.S...
  
   & M. E. Maron (1985). "An evaluation of retrieval effectiveness for a full-text document-retrieval system." Communications of the ACM, 28(3): 289-299. ACM
• Sergey Brin
  Sergey Brin
  Sergey Mikhaylovich Brin is a Russian-born American computer scientist and internet entrepreneur who, with Larry Page, co-founded Google, one of the largest internet companies. , his personal wealth is estimated to be $16.7 billion....
  
   & Lawrence Page (1998). "The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine." Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, vol. 30, no. 1-7, pp. 107–117. ACM
• Yulan He & Siu Cheung Hui (2002). "Mining a web citation database for author co-citation analysis." Information Processing and Management: An International Journal, 38(4): 491-508. ACM
• S. Bradshaw (2003). "Reference directed indexing: Redeeming relevance for subject search in citation indexes." In: Proceedings of the European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (ECDL), pp. 499–510.
• Anna Ritchie, Simone Teufel & Stephen Robertson (2006). "Creating a test collection for citation-based IR experiments." Proceedings of the main conference on Human Language Technology Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association of Computational Linguistics, pp. 391–398, June 4-09, 2006, New York.
• Makoto Iwayama, Atsushi Fujii, Noriko Kando & Yozo Marukawa (2006). "Evaluating patent retrieval in the third NTCIR workshop." Information Processing and Management: An International Journal, 42(1): 207-221. ACM
• Atsushi Fujii (2007). "Enhancing patent retrieval by citation analysis." SIGIR '07 Proceedings of the 30th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, pp. 793–794. ACM
• Trevor Strohman, W. Bruce Croft
  W. Bruce Croft
  W. Bruce Croft is a distinguished professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst whose work focuses on information retrieval....
  
   & David Jensen (2007). "Recommending citations for academic papers." Proceedings of the 30th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, July 23–27, 2007, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
• Anna Ritchie, Stephen Robertson & Simone Teufel (2008). "Comparing citation contexts for information retrieval." CIKM '08 Proceeding of the 17th ACM conference on Information and knowledge management. ACM

Notes

External links

Jeppe Nicolaisen, Bibliographic coupling in Birger Hjørland, ed., Core Concepts in Library and Information Science