The Impact of the ISI Convention of Relying on only the Name of the First Author on ACA Results: An Empirical Investigation

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Author(s): Sean Eom (Southeast Missouri State University, USA)
Copyright: 2009
Pages: 29
Source title: Author Cocitation Analysis: Quantitative Methods for Mapping the Intellectual Structure of an Academic Discipline
Source Author(s)/Editor(s): Sean B. Eom (Southeast Missouri State University, USA)
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-738-6.ch003

Keywords: Information Science Reference / Library & Information Science / Library Information Systems / Library Science

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Abstract

Virtually all ACA studies using Thomson’s ISI citation indexes used only the first author to retrieve the cocitation counts. Therefore, this has been a methodological issue in ACA study. First, this chapter introduces two classifications of author cocitations (Rousseau & Zuccala, 2004; Zhao, 2006). Second, literature survey of three studies is conducted to review what has been done to deal with this issue. Third, we discuss the data and cocitation matrix generation system used in our study. Fourth, using our data produced by the cocitation matrix generation system, principal component analysis and non-metric multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) are applied to compare the differences in the process and outcomes of using different cocitation matrices. Finally, we discussed the results of comparative analyses of our study and three other studies in this area. In doing so, the treatment of the diagonal values in a cocitation matrix, the number of authors in all author ACA and first author ACA are critical determinants of ACA outcomes such as number of factors, total percent of variance explained, goodness of fit, and so forth. In future research, it is imperative to use the same assumption in regard to the treatment of the diagonal values, the selection of authors using the same criterion, and so forth. If these are not uniformly standardized, the results are always incomparable and have less meaning. Three conclusions can be reached based on our study. First, all author-based ACA is better to capture all influential researchers in a field than first author-based ACA. It identifies more subspecialties. Finally, all author-based ACA and first author based ACA produce little differences in stress values.

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The Impact of the ISI Convention of Relying on only the Name of the First Author on ACA Results: An Empirical Investigation

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