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Co-cited author retrieval and relevance theory: examples from the humanities

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Abstract

Given a user-selected seed author, a unique experimental system called AuthorWeb can return the 24 authors most frequently co-cited with the seed in a 10-year segment of the Arts and Humanities Citation Index. The Web-based system can then instantly display the seed and the others as a Pathfinder network, a Kohonen self-organizing map, or a pennant diagram. Each display gives a somewhat different overview of the literature cited with the seed in a specialty (e.g., Thomas Mann studies). Each is also a live interface for retrieving (1) the documents that co-cite the seed with another user-selected author, and (2) the works by the seed and the other author that are co-cited. This article describes the Pathfinder and Kohonen maps, but focuses much more on AuthorWeb pennant diagrams, exhibited here for the first time. Pennants are interesting because they unite ego-centered co-citation data from bibliometrics, the TF*IDF formula from information retrieval, and Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory (RT) from linguistic pragmatics. RT provides a cognitive interpretation of TF*IDF weighting. By making people’s inferential processes a primary concern, RT also yields insights into both topical and non-topical relevance, central matters in information science. Pennants for several authors in the humanities demonstrate these insights.

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Notes

  1. Dialog, the “Cadillac” of bibliographic information services since the 1960s, was purchased by ProQuest in 2006. In 2013 ProQuest took the decades-old DialogClassic software out of service and terminated access through it to the Thomson Reuters citation databases.

  2. More than 25 nodes can be mapped in extensions of AuthorWeb software to medical databases in the Visual Concept Explorer (Zhu et al. 2005; Lin et al. 2007), but such additions arguably lead to information overload.

  3. Which expands to: Freud, Sigmund. (1921). Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse. Wien: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag. [Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Vienna: International Psychoanalytic Press.] The commas at the end of strings indicate truncations.

  4. In White (2007a, b, 2009, 2010a) I divided the pennants into sectors on the basis of my own qualitative judgments. AuthorWeb pennants are simply divided into thirds mechanically, and so their qualitative implications are even more approximate.

  5. Harter et al. (1993) sampled pairs of citing-cited documents (not co-cited documents) and analyzed their subject indexing for presumed semantic closeness. They found that such closeness could not be taken for granted, because the descriptors assigned to the pairs rarely matched exactly. But perfect descriptor match is a highly restrictive standard. It misses partial matches, leaves out terms from titles and abstracts altogether, and ignores semantic ties that occur in body text, rather than at the level of the entire works. More generally, it discounts the human ability to infer semantic relations that fall outside exact term-matching. However, since Harter (1992) had already advocated Sperber and Wilson’s subjective approach to relevance, the inadequacy of an “objective” descriptor-based approach seems to be the real point of the 1993 article.

  6. The form Bates-M appears because the same article sometimes cites Marcia or Milton both with and without their middle initial.

  7. T. S. Eliot is not completely irrelevant to Marcia Bates’s work. Information scientists occasionally quote his lines in Choruses from “The Rock”: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” Since a few of them have also cited her in the same article, her co-citation count with Eliot is not zero (cf. Bates 2010).

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Acknowledgments

GESIS, the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Cologne, Germany, generously supported preliminary work on this article during summer 2013. I am grateful to several GESIS colleagues for stimulating discussions: Andreas Strotmann, Philipp Mayr, Philipp Schaer, and Maria Zens. Ideas in the article were also presented in a talk at the University of Amsterdam, and I thank Alesia Zuccala (of the University’s Center for Digital Humanities) and Andrea Scharnhorst (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences) for the invitation. Rens Bod, John Rigby, and Gunnar Sivertsen kindly suggested seed authors for me to map. I asked the latter two for reactions, and they provided them. I am pleased to quote from them here. I also thank my anonymous referees for instructive comments.

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    Howard D. White

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White, H.D. Co-cited author retrieval and relevance theory: examples from the humanities. Scientometrics 102, 2275–2299 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-014-1483-4

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