The Effects of Co-citation Proximity on Co-citation Analysis

In this paper we investigate the effects of co-citation proximity on the quality of co-citation analysis through four experiments of co-citation instances found in full-text scientific publications. First, we compared the distributions of co-citation instances at four levels of proximity in journal articles with the traditionally used article-level co-citation counts. Second, we analyzed how co-citation instances at different proximity levels are distributed across organizational sections in articles. Third, the distribution of co-citation proximity over different co-citation frequency groups is investigated. Fourth, we identified the roles of co-citations at different proximity levels with reference to the corresponding traditional co-citation network. The results show that sentence-level co-citations not only preserve the essential structure of the traditional co-citation network but also form a much smaller subset of the entire co-citation instances typically considered by traditional co-citation analysis. Implications for improving our understanding of underlying factors concerning co-citations and developing more efficient co-citation analysis methods are discussed.