Is indexing trustworthy? Classification of articles through co-word analysis

Abstract

There are two methods which use material from documentary data bases to determine the structure of fields of;scientific and technical research. One of these, that of co-citation, has been developed by H. Small and his collaborators at the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) at Philadelphia [4]. This permits the identification of scientific special-ties by determining sets of articles that are fre-quently co-cited in subsequent publications. This method, first developed for the scientific literature, has now been applied to patents [11]. The second method, that of co-word analysis. has been devel-oped jointly at the Centre de Sociologie de fin-novation at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris, and the Centre de Documentation