Author Name Co-Mention Analysis: Testing a Poor Man's Author Co-Citation Analysis Method

TL;DR

This paper explores a simplified author co-mention analysis method for German sociology literature, aiming to overcome database coverage issues and provide insights into author relationships over 25 years.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, low-cost co-mention analysis approach as an alternative to traditional author co-citation analysis for underrepresented fields.

Findings

Preliminary results show promising insights into author relationships.

The method is feasible but requires further refinement for comprehensive analysis.

Encouraging initial outcomes suggest potential for broader application.

Abstract

As a social science information service for the German language countries, we document research projects, publications, and data in relevant fields. At the same time, we aim to provide well-founded bibliometric studies of these fields. Performing a citation analysis on an area of the German social sciences is, however, a serious challenge given the low and likely significantly biased coverage of these fields in the standard citation databases. Citations, and especially author citations, play a highly significant role in that literature, however. In this work in progress, we report preliminary methods and results for an author name co-mention analysis of a large fragment of a particularly interesting corpus of German sociology: a quarter century's worth of the full-text proceedings of the Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer Soziologie (DGS), which celebrated its 100th anniversary meeting in 2012. Results are encouraging for this poor cousin of author co-citation analysis, but considerable refinements, especially of the underlying computational infrastructure for full-text analysis, appear advisable for full-scale deployment of this method.