Using the appearance of citations in full text on author co-citation analysis

As a frequently used method of depicting scientific intellectual structures, author co-citation analysis (ACA) has been applied to many domains. However, only count-based information is involved as the input of ACA, which is not sufficiently informative for knowledge representations. This article catches several metadata in full text of citing papers but not aims at content-level information, which increases the amount of information input to ACA without increasing computational complexity a lot. We propose a new method by involving information including the number of mentioned times in a citing paper and the number of context words in a citing sentence. We combine these pieces of information into the traditional ACA and compare the results between ACA and the proposed approach by using factor analysis, network analysis, and MDS-measurement. The result of our empirical study indicates that compared with the traditional ACA, the proposed method shows a better clustering performance in visualizations and reveals more details in displaying intellectual structures.