Research Fronts 2014 : 100 Top Ranked Specialties In The Sciences And Social / quote 8 of 9
Fractional co-citation clustering
Garfield and Small both continued their research and experiments in science mapping over the decade and thereafter. In two papers published in 1985, Small introduced an important modification to his method for defining research fronts: fractional co-citation clustering. By counting citation frequency fractionally, based on the length of the reference list in the citing papers, he was able to adjust for differences in the average rate of citation among fields and therefore remove the bias that whole counting gave to biomedical and other “high citing” fields. As a consequence, mathematics, for example, emerged more strongly, having been underrepresented by integer counting.