Age-sensitive bibliographic coupling with an application in the history of science

In science mapping, bibliographic coupling (BC) has been a standard tool for discovering the cognitive structure of research areas, such as constituent subareas, directions, schools of thought, or paradigms. Modelled as a set of documents, research areas are often sorted into document clusters via BC representing a thematic unit each. In this paper we propose an alternative method called age-sensitive bibliographic coupling: the aim is to enable the standard method to produce historically valid thematic units, that is, to yield document clusters that represent the historical development of the thematic structure of the subject as well. As such, the method is expected to be especially beneficial for investigations on science dynamics and the history of science. We apply the method within a bibliometric study in the modern history of bioscience, addressing the development of a complex, interdisciplinary discourse called the Species Problem. As a result, a quantitative and qualitative comparison of the standard and the proposed method of bibliographic coupling will be reported, together with a pilot study on the cognitive–historical structure of the Species Problem, regarding an important fragment of the discourse.