NWB2023_Bibliographic coupling as a sleeping beauty: Recent developments around the original similarity measure

As one of the first techniques invented in the 1960s to leverage citation indexes, Bibliometric Coupling has long been a basic operation offered by bibliometric tools. Despite being commonplace, there has been a surge of interest in this fundamental technique in recent years such that publication and citation trends on this topic exhibit a Sleeping Beauty pattern. Why would a 60-year-old form of citation analysis have recaptured the interest of information scientists? This presentation will provide an overview of the concept of Bibliometric Coupling, highlighting significant papers that have examined its usefulness over the decades, clarifying the (confusing) similarities with statistical measures such as Salton’s cosine and Jaccard similarity, and culminating in the details of two new R packages for calculating Bibliometric Coupling. An exploration of the recent publications about Bibliometric Coupling will seek to explain the resurgence of interest in this form of citation analysis. On a more practical level, a case study will showcase how Bibliometric Coupling can be easily applied in a visualization that enables non-specialists to identify potential collaborators at other universities. Finally, a more programmatic approach to perform large-scale coupling will be demonstrated. Documentation for performing these analyses will be shared with participants as an R script.