Analyzing Interdisciplinary Research Using Co-Authorship Networks

Table 1

Summary of bibliometric methods.

	Methods	Description	Units of analysis	Strengths	Limitations
1	Citation	Citation rates evaluate the impact of documents, authors, or journals	Author document journal	Important work in the field can quickly be found	Since newer articles have little time to be referenced, citation count as a metric of impact is weighted against older publications
2	Cocitation	Connect journals, documents, and authors, based on joint presence in the reference list	Author document journal	The most widely used and validated bibliometric tool for linking authors, articles, and journals is cocitation. It is considered reliable. It filters the most important works.	Since it is conducted on cited papers, cocitation is not ideal for mapping research fronts. Since citations take time to accumulate, new publications can only be linked by knowledge base clusters. Since multiple citations are needed to map an article, it is not possible to map articles that are rarely cited.
3	Co-word	It connects keywords if they seem in a similar title, abstract, or keyword list	Word	It analyses documents based on their content. Many other methods, on the other hand, depend on metadata.	It’s possible that the word will appear in multiple contexts and take on different meanings
4	Bibliographic-coupling	Connects the journals, documents, and authors based on a number of mutual references	Author document journal	.It does not need a citation to accrue. It could be used for newer publications that are not cited yet.	Can use only for a short timeframe (for the interval of five years). The most critical works are not even mentioned. Even it has trouble determining whether or not the mapped publications are relevant.
5	Co-author	When two or more authors collaborate on a document, it connects both	Author	It produces the social structure of fields and can provide an indication of collaboration	Author name disambiguation issues arise in the co-authorship network