Can citation analysis of Web publications better detect research fronts?

We present evidence that, in some research fields, research published in journals and reported on the Web may collectively represent different evolutionary stages of the field with journals lagging a few years behind the Web on average; and that a “two-tier” scholarly communication system may therefore be evolving. We conclude that, in such fields, (a) for detecting current research fronts, author co-citation analyses (ACA) using papers published on the Web as a data source can outperform traditional ACAs using articles published in journals as data; and that (b), as a result, it is important to use multiple data sources in citation analysis studies of scholarly communication for a complete picture of communication patterns. Our evidence stems from comparing the respective intellectual structures of the XML research field, a subfield of computer science, as revealed from three sets of ACA covering two time periods: (1) from the field’s beginnings in 1996 to 2001; and (2) from 20...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: JASIS
• Authors: Dangzhi Zhao, Andreas Strotmann
• Keywords: JASIS 2007, Journals, Research, Time Period