Co-citation analysis between coupler authors of a scientific domain’s citation identity: a case study in scientometrics

This research aims to visualize the intensity of proximity between authors simultaneously cited (couplers) through a set of articles of great interest to the scientometric community. Author co-citation analysis consecutively to bibliographic coupling analysis of articles allows a more refined and significant analysis for the representation of the complex scientific structure that forms the research front of a scientific field. This refinement was entitled Co-citation Analysis between Coupler Authors (CCA). As universe of analysis, we retrieved all reference lists (cited authors) of the 10 most downloaded articles from the Scientometrics journal in 2020. Then, the coupling was established between the citing articles and following, the co-citation between all the cited authors and between the coupler authors only. There were 663 different authors cited by the 10 articles, and the analysis promoted a refinement of 89.4% authors compared to all cited authors, constituting a more reliable representation of the intellectual structure of the articles. The association between the methods will identify which and how often the citing items come together, who the coupler authors responsible for this approach are, and how the co-citation between them is configured.