An exploratory study of the all-author bibliographic coupling analysis: Taking scientometrics for example

Abstract

All-author bibliographic coupling analyses (AABCA) take all authors of the article into account when constructing author coupling relationships. Taking scientometrics as an example, this article takes the papers from 2010 to 2019 as data sample and divides them into two periods (limited to 5 years) to discuss the performance of AABCA in discovering potential academic communities and intellectual structure of this discipline. It is found that when all authors of the paper are considered, the relationship between the bibliographic coupling authors presents a certain regularity and the bibliographic coupling is likely to be passed between different pairs of authors. With the transitivity of the coupling relationship, AABCA can effectively identify and discover the potential academic groups of this discipline, and more fully reflect the degree of cooperation among authors. AABCA is an effective method to reveal the intellectual structure in the field of scientometrics, and it is easier to find some small research topics with weak correlation. In addition, AABCA is also an ideal way to explore the author’s research interests over time.