A new approach to journal co-citation matrix construction based on the number of co-cited articles in journals

Co-citation analysis is one of the most important methods in information science. Journal co-citation analysis has been widely used to analyze the relevance, relationship and structure of underlying articles between journals. Accurate construction of co-citation matrix is a key to accurate journal co-citation analysis. However, the traditional co-citation matrix construction based on co-citation frequency of journals does not accurately reflect the similarity between journals. This paper proposes a new construction method of co-citation matrix based on the number of co-citation articles in journals. The experimental validation has been conducted with real datasets from Chinese Social Science Citation Index and National Knowledge Infrastructure. The results show that the proposed method can accurately capture the similarity between journals and outperform the existing approaches (i.e. co-citation frequency and co-citation ratio approaches). In addition, the proposed method does not need the full-text index of a paper, which provides added value in the field.