Scholarly network similarities: How bibliographic coupling networks, citation networks, cocitation networks, topical networks, coauthorship networks, and coword networks relate to each other by Erjia Yan and Ying Ding. (Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology Volume 63, Issue 7, pages 1313–1326, July 2012)
Abstract:
This study explores the similarity among six types of scholarly networks aggregated at the institution level, including bibliographic coupling networks, citation networks, cocitation networks, topical networks, coauthorship networks, and coword networks. Cosine distance is chosen to measure the similarities among the six networks. The authors found that topical networks and coauthorship networks have the lowest similarity; cocitation networks and citation networks have high similarity; bibliographic coupling networks and cocitation networks have high similarity; and coword networks and topical networks have high similarity. In addition, through multidimensional scaling, two dimensions can be identified among the six networks: Dimension 1 can be interpreted as citation-based versus noncitation-based, and Dimension 2 can be interpreted as social versus cognitive. The authors recommend the use of hybrid or heterogeneous networks to study research interaction and scholarly communications.
Interesting that I should come across this article after posting about data sets. See http://info.slis.indiana.edu/~eyan/papers/citation/ the post-processing data and interactive visualizations that are reproduced as static views in the article.
At page 1323 the authors say:
In addition to social networks versus information networks, another distinction of real connection-based networks versus artificial connection-based networks can be made. Coauthorship networks and citation networks are constructed based on real connections, whereas cocitation, bibliographic coupling, topical, and coword networks are constructed based on artificial connections,5 usually in the form of similarity measurements.
I am not sure about the “real” versus “artificial” connection that comes so easily to hand. In part because authors, in my experience, tend to use terminology similar to other scholars with who they agree. So the connection between the work of scholars isn’t “artificial,” although it isn’t accounted for in this study.
There is much to admire and even imitate in this article but the interaction between scholars is more complex than its representation by the networks here.