Research Fronts 2014 : 100 Top Ranked Specialties In The Sciences And Social / quote 6 of 9
Co-citation strength and research fronts
The method of measuring co-citation similarity and the threshold of co-citation strength employed in creating research fronts has changed over the years. Today, we use cosine similarity, calculated as the co-citation frequency count divided by the square root of the product of the citation counts for the two papers. The minimum threshold for co-citation strength is a cosine similarity measure of .1, but this can be raised incrementally to break apart large clusters if the front exceeds a maximum number of core papers, which is set at 50. Trial and error has shown this procedure yields consistently meaningful research fronts.