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ABSTRACT
Online e-journal databases enable scholars to search the literature in a research domain or to crosssearch an interdisciplinary field. The key literature can thereby be efficiently mapped. This study builds a web-based citation analysis system consisting of four modules: (1) literature search; (2) statistics; (3) articles analysis; and (4) co-citation analysis. The system focuses on the PubMed Central dataset and facilitates specific keyword searches in each research domain for authors, journals, and core issues. In addition, we use data mining techniques for co-citation analysis. The results could help researchers develop an in-depth understanding of the research domain. An automated system for co-citation analysis promises to facilitate understanding of the changing trends that affect the journal structure of research domains. The proposed system has the potential to become a value-added database of the healthcare domain, which will benefit researchers.
INTRODUCTION
Healthcare is a multidisciplinary research domain of medical services provided both inside and outside a hospital or clinical setting. Article retrieval for systematic reviews in the domain is much more elusive than retrieval for reviews in clinical medicine because of the interdisciplinary nature of the field and the lack of a significant body of evaluative literature. Other connecting research fields consist of the respective research fields of the application domain (i.e., the health sciences, including medicine and nursing).1 In addition, valuable knowledge and methods can be taken from the fields of psychology, the social sciences, economics, ethics, and law. Further, the integration of those disciplines is attracting increasing interest.2
Researchers may use bibliometrics to evaluate the influence of a paper or describe the relationship between citing and cited papers. Citation analysis, one of several possible bibliometric approaches, is more popular than others because of the advent of information technologies.3 Citation analysis counts the frequency of cited papers from a set of citing papers to determine the most influential scholars, publications, or universities in a discipline. It can be classified into two basic types: the first type counts only the citations in a paper that are authored by an individual, while the second type analyzes co-citations to identify intellectual links among authors in different articles. This paper focuses on the second type of citation analysis.
Small defined co-citation analysis as "the frequency with which two...