The Value of Co-Citation Analysis for Understanding a Field’s Intellectual Structure: An Application to Healthcare Information Technology (HIT) Research Completed Research Paper

In this paper, we introduce the technique of co-citation analysis from the field of Library and Information Science. In addition to describing how this analytic method has been employed in other fields, we explain how document co-citation analysis differs from author co-citation analysis in terms of precision. We pose three questions for our empirical study of HIT research and describe our document co-citation analysis of citations to HIT research appearing in 20 leading IS journals and eight leading general medicine journals from 2000 to 2010. We performed co-citation analysis separately for published research in IS and medicine, identifying nine and eight subfields of HIT research, respectively. We describe the specific subfields in each domain and list sample papers corresponding to them. Finally, we identify the common attributes of older studies that cause them to be co-cited often, including how such attributes differ between IS vs. medicine.