Interpretation and validation of groupings in author cocitation analysis: exploratory and methodological study

Abstract

In the context of the interpretation and validation of an authors cocitation analysis, the following objectives are formulated: (i) to compare data from the citing articles of the corpus with data characterizing the citing and the cited authors of an ACA cluster; (ii) to propose additional indicators related to the authors that form the grouping; and (iii) to visualize the network of cocitation documents of the authors that form the cluster. The work is exploratory and methodological and the data were extracted from 151 articles on Knowledge Organization, from 2011 to 2015, retrieved in the Web Of Science database. A symmetric matrix with 50 positions (authors with nine or more citing articles) generated five clusters. The main cluster (17 authors) is the object of this analysis. The authors are cocited in 69 articles. From the 131 authors’ relations in references, 84 occur also in the paragraph. There are data comparing citations, citing and cited documents for each of the 17 authors. The cluster has 230 articles cited. It is concluded that the proximity of the cocitation in the paragraph validates the cluster and that the other results broaden the view of the formation and the characterization of cocitation relations between authors. The results demonstrate that the clusters in an ACA can be analyzed as autonomous units and that the description of the data that support the formation of the cluster (citing articles and authors), which characterize the participating authors and the cocited document network, collaborates in the validation and interpretation relations relations, because it presents objective data. It is hoped that this exploratory approach can be applied in other ACA, regardless of the area.