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A new bibliographic coupling measure with descriptive capability

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Abstract

Bibliographic coupling (BC) is an effective measure to estimate the similarity between two scholarly articles (i.e., inter-article similarity between the two articles). It works on out-link references of articles (i.e., those references cited by the articles), and is essential for relatedness analysis and topic clustering of scholarly articles. In this paper, we present a new BC measure DescriptiveBC, which employs the titles of the out-link references to improve BC in two ways: given a target article a, DescriptiveBC provides more accurate information about how (based on numerical inter-article similarity) and why (based on textual descriptive terms) a scholarly article is related to a. Visualization of the information can support the identification, clustering, mapping, and navigation of the related evidence in scientific literature. Empirical evaluation justifies the contributions of DescriptiveBC. Release of the reference titles in each article is thus helpful for the dissemination of research findings in scientific literature, and DescriptiveBC can be incorporated into search engines of scholarly articles to help prospective researchers to navigate through the space of related articles online.

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Notes

  1. Basic description of the “KeyWords Plus” service can be found at http://interest.science.thomsonreuters.com/content/WOKUserTips-201010-IN.

  2. DisGeNET is available at http://www.disgenet.org/web/DisGeNET/menu/home.

  3. The ways of database update by Genetic Home Reference and Online Mendelian Inheritance in Human can be found at http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/ExpertReviewers and http://www.omim.org/about, respectively.

  4. GAD is available at available at http://geneticassociationdb.nih.gov.

  5. CTD is available at available at http://ctdbase.org.

  6. PubMed Central is available at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc.

  7. The title of PMC1774044 is “Absence of PRSS1 mutations and association of SPINK1 trypsin inhibitor mutations in hereditary and non-hereditary chronic pancreatitis”.

  8. The title of PMC1773194 is “The N34S mutation of SPINK1 (PSTI) is associated with a familial pattern of idiopathic chronic pancreatitis but does not cause the disease”.

  9. The title of PMC1773221 is “Mutations in serine protease inhibitor Kazal type 1 are strongly associated with chronic pancreatitis”.

  10. The title of PMC2928535 is “Inhibition of acinar apoptosis occurs during acute pancreatitis in the human homologue ∆F508 cystic fibrosis mouse”.

  11. A basic description for cationic trypsinogen and serine peptidase can be found at Genetic Home Reference: https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/gene/PRSS1.

  12. A basic description for the CFTR gene and cystic fibrosis can be found at Genetic Home Reference: https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/cystic-fibrosis#genes.

  13. A basic description for the erythropoietin (EPO) gene can be found at Genetic Home Reference: https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/gene/EPO#.

  14. The title of PMC3441831 is “Erythropoietin Receptor Contributes to Melanoma Cell Survival in vivo”.

  15. The title of PMC1386105 is “Signals for stress erythropoiesis are integrated via an erythropoietin receptor–phosphotyrosine-343–Stat5 axis”.

  16. The title of PMC2754516 is “Use of agents stimulating erythropoiesis in digestive diseases”.

  17. The title of PMC1890992 is “Erythropoietin/erythropoietin receptor system is involved in angiogenesis in human neuroblastoma”.

  18. Epoetin alfa is human erythropoietin produced in cell culture.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan (Grant ID: MOST 104-2221-E-320-005).

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  1. Department of Medical Informatics, Tzu Chi University, Hualien, Taiwan

    Rey-Long Liu

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  1. Rey-Long Liu
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Liu, RL. A new bibliographic coupling measure with descriptive capability. Scientometrics 110, 915–935 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2196-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2196-7

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