Abstract
Since the term “co-link” was put forward, many scholars have done exploratory investigations to prove the applicability and validity of co-link analysis used in mapping internet structure and mining relationships among internet colonies. All of these studies are based on the whole links in the web called “total co-link analysis”. However, there are both substantive and non-substantive links in the web, and the number of the latter outweights that of the former, which makes the preconditions of total co-link analysis untenable. In this paper, we present “substantive co-link analysis”, and believe it is more sound and valid than “total co-link analysis”. Then exploratory investigations on both total and substantive co-link analysis are carried out with the sample of 20 academic blogs on Library and Information Science, the results of which testify our assumption that “substantive co-link analysis” is more efficient and reasonable than “total co-link analysis”.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Björneborn, L. (2004), Small-World Link Structures across an Academic Web Space. Retrieved May 6, 2007, from http://vip.db.dk/lb/phd/default.htm
Chen D. Q. (2003), Study on the Application of Automatic Focused Searching (in Chinese version). Beijing, China: Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Chu, H., He, S., Thelwall, M. (2002), Library and information science schools in Canada and USA: A webometric perspective. Journal of Education for Library and Information Science, 43(2): 110–125.
Eckmann, J., Moses, E. (2002), Curvature of Co-links Uncovers Hidden Thematic Layers in the World Wide Web. Retrieved May. 8, 2007, from http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/99/9/5825
Faba-Perez, C., Guerrero-Bote, V. P., De Moya-Anegon, F. (2003), Data mining in a closed web environment. Scientometrics, 58(3): 623–640.
Heimeriks, G., Hörlesberger M., Van Den Besselaar, P. (2003). Mapping communication and collaboration in heterogeneous research networks. Scientometrics, 58(2): 391–413.
Ingwersen, P. (1998), The calculation of web impact factors. Journal of Documentation, 54(2): 236–243.
Larson, R. (1996), Bibliometrics of the World Wide Web: An exploratory analysis of the intellectual structure of Cyberspace. Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science, 71–78. Retrieved Jan. 9, 2007, from http://sherlock.berkeley.edu/asis96/asis96.html
Leydesdorff, L., Vaughan, L. (2006), Co-occurrence matrices and their applications in information science: Extending ACA to the web environment. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 57(12): 1616–1628.
McCain, K. W. (1990), Mapping authors in intellectual space: A technical overview. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 41(6): 433–443.
Qiu, J. P., Li, J. (2007), Demonstrative study of citation analysis: The analysis of domestic research on reference service, document, Information & Knowledge (in Chinese version), 115: 54–57.
Qiu, J. P., Ma, R. M. (2005), A exploratory study of co-citation on LIS based on CSSCI. Knowledge of Information Science and Library (in Chinese version), 107: 77–79, 98.
Qiu, J. P., Ma, R. M., Li, Y. J. (2007), A reflection on the methods of co-citation analysis (forthcoming). Journal of the China Society for Scientific and Technical Information (in Chinese version), 26(5).
Smith, A. G. (2003), Classifying links for substantive Web Impact Factors. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Scientometrics and Informatrics, 305–311.
Thelwall, M. (2004), Link Analysis: An Information Science Approach. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Thelwall, M., Wilkinson, D. (2004), Finding similar academic Web sites with links, bibliometric couplings and colinks. Information Processing & Management, 40(3): 515–526. Retrieved May 8, 2007 from http://www.scit.wlv.ac.uk/:_cm1993/papers/2004_IPM_Links_Bibliometric_Couplings_Colinks.pdf
Vaughan, L., You, J. (2006), Comparing business competition positions based on Web Co-Link Data: The global market vs the Chinese market. Scientometrics, 68(3): 611–628.
Wang, X. Y., Zhou, A.Y. (2003), Linkage analysis for the World Wide Web and its application: A survey. Journal of Software (in Chinese version), 14(10): 1768–1780.
White, H. D., Mccain, K. W. (1998), Visualizing a discipline: an author co-citation analysis of information science, 1972–1995. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 49(4): 327–355.
Zhou Q. (2006), Studying on the development and applications of co-link analysis. Library and Information Service (in Chinese version), 50(10): 44–47.
Zuccala A. (2006), Author cocitation analysis is to intellectual structure as web colink analysis is to …? Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 57(11): 1487–1502.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Qiu, J., Li, Y., Li, J. et al. An exploratory study on substantive co-link analysis: A modification to total co-link analysis. Scientometrics 76, 327–341 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-007-1921-7
Received:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-007-1921-7