Six Degrees of Scholarship

Jan Buzydlowski

ASIS&T 2008 Annual Meeting (AM08 2008)
Columbus, Ohio, October 24-29, 2008

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Summary

This paper extends on the work of a previous paper, “Exploring Co-Citation Chains,” presented in the ASIS&T 2006 Conference, by introducing a specialized database and using a supercomputing-class machine, to create co-citation chains in real-time and to develop a technique for their use, exploratory co-citation chain analysis.

The paper illustrates the above techniques using several examples of the software and hardware on a subset of the Arts & Humanities Index (AHCI) from the years of 1988 – 1997. Specifically, it shows that chains created in the previous work could be generated in real-time and can be shortened considerably. Additionally, it introduces exploratory techniques, such as interest chains, where only one name is specified and chains of interest, as defined by the user, are created. The paper then goes on to explore the idea of chains generated to the point where no new names are found and suggests that six degrees of separation is the limiting length within the AHCI data set.

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