Abstract
Since the term “co-link” was put forward, many scholars have done exploratory investigations to prove the applicability and validity of co-link analysis used in mapping internet structure and mining relationships among internet colonies. All of these studies are based on the whole links in the web called “total co-link analysis”. However, there are both substantive and non-substantive links in the web, and the number of the latter outweights that of the former, which makes the preconditions of total co-link analysis untenable. In this paper, we present “substantive co-link analysis”, and believe it is more sound and valid than “total co-link analysis”. Then exploratory investigations on both total and substantive co-link analysis are carried out with the sample of 20 academic blogs on Library and Information Science, the results of which testify our assumption that “substantive co-link analysis” is more efficient and reasonable than “total co-link analysis”.
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Qiu, J., Li, Y., Li, J. et al. An exploratory study on substantive co-link analysis: A modification to total co-link analysis. Scientometrics 76, 327–341 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-007-1921-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-007-1921-7