Bibliographic coupling
Documents are
said to be bibliographically coupled if they share one or more
bibliographic references. The concept of bibliographic coupling was introduced
by Kessler (1963) who demonstrated the existence of the phenomenon and argued
for its usefulness as an indicator of subject relatedness. The major theoretical
criticism of this notion appeared soon after in a one-page article by Martyn
(1964, p. 236) who sagaciously observed that there is no guarantee that two
bibliographically coupled documents (A) and (B) cite the same piece of
information in (C). He also observed that even if (A) and (B) cite the same
piece of information in (C) we do not know the size of the conjunction and
therefore, considering now the conjunction of two other documents (M) and (N),
we may not equate (A)Ç(B) with (M)Ç(N). These observations led Martyn to
conclude that a bibliographic coupling is merely an indication of the existence
of the probability, value unknown, of relationship between two documents rather
than a constant unit of similarity. His conclusion finds empirically support in
Vladutz & Cook’s (1984) results. In their validation study, a random selection
of 10.000 articles from the SCI was coupled with papers from the entire SCI
database and lists of the three most strongly bibliographically coupled items
were compiled. Professional indexers were then asked to assess the relatedness
of these papers for a random sample of 300 lists. The indexers were merely able
to report some degree of subject relatedness in little more than 85% of the
cases, which decreased to 81% when the frequency of occurrence in the entire
database and the length of the reference lists were both taken into account. It
consequently seems reasonable to assume that such quantitative meters provide
more valid results in some areas as opposed to others. Virgo (1971, p. 289), for
instance, anticipates that the critical threshold value for the coupling
strengths possibly varies from field to field and even within fields, and
Weinberg (1974) predicts that bibliographic coupling should work best for
repetitive literature (e.g., review articles) because such literature often cite
a lot of older works.
Literature:
Jarneving, B. (2006). The
Combined Application of Bibliographic Coupling and the
Complete Link Cluster Method in Bibliometric Science Mapping. Borås:
Valfrid. (Dissertation).
Kessler, M.
M. (1963). Bibliographic coupling between scientific papers. American
Documentation, 14: 10-25.
Martyn, J. (1964). Bibliographic coupling. Journal of Documentation, 20(4): 236.
Virgo, J. A. (1971). The review article: Its characteristics and problems. The Library Quarterly, 41(4): 275-291.
Vladutz, G. & Cook, J. (1984), Bibliographic coupling and subject relatedness. Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science, 21: 204-207.
Weinberg, B. H. (1974). Bibliographic coupling: A review. Information Storage and Retrieval, 10: 189-196.
See also: Co-citation