Words and co-words as indicators of intellectual organization

It appears that the co-word structure of citing documents is about the same as that of cited documents for a set of biochemistry articles, which reflects the intellectual structure of the document set and the intellectual organization of the work of related groups of authors.

Abstract

Co-word linkages among documents have been proposed as an alternative to citations and co-citations to indicate ("map") how documents are related. From this study, it appears that the co-word structure of citing documents is about the same as that of cited documents for a set of biochemistry articles. This co-word structure reflects the intellectual structure of the document set and the intellectual organization of the work of related groups of authors, as can be validated against the results of an independent document analysis. It will be argued that given the condition of a restricted document set, the document structure, in terms of attributed word-word associations in the titles of scientific articles, provides us with a tool for the description of intellectual organization. Since most science studies and nearly all science policy studies use institutionally defined sets of documents, this instrument could have a wide range of applications.