Methods for selecting authors for co-citation studies: how to define a cutoff point

• Autor(a) principal: Carvalho, Rodrigo A. de
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Outros Autores: Muck, Francieli A. L., Corrêa, Sabrina S., Carvalho, Catarina P. de, Caregnato, Sônia Elisa
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Brazilian Journal of Information Science
• DOI: 10.36311/1981-1640.2021.v15.e02109
• Texto Completo: https://revistas.marilia.unesp.br/index.php/bjis/article/view/11215
• topic: Author co-citation analysis – ACA; Citation studies; Scientometrics; Análise de cocitação de autores - ACA; Estudos de citação; Cientometria

The paper focuses on author co-citation analysis - ACA, particularly presenting a proposal to define the selection of authors. Objectives: a) to compare total citation, citation per citing document and author’s co-citation with himself, to define the most appropriate indicator for inclusion of authors; and b) to propose a way to establish a cut-off point for creating of the matrices. Two data sets, retrieved from the Web of Science, were used: set A, composed of 17,992 references from 421 articles; Set B, composed of 5,771 references from 151 articles. The citation per citing document is more appropriate to classify authors than the total number of citations and author's co-citation with himself. To include authors whose citations by citing documents reach approximately 20% proved to be appropriate, but authors cited only once, which constitute absolute dispersion data, should not be included in the calculations. Regarding the data in Set A, 180 authors (20.6% of the sum of citations) and 72 authors (20.1% of the sum of citations) were defined, considering all the positions of the references and the first positions, respectively. It concludes by the validity of the proposal for contextualizing the data analyzed and considering the best distribution of cited authors mentioned in the corpus.