Methods

The methods used in this exploratory research are fundamentally identical to those used in both author and journal cocitation mapping. These methods are described in detail in WhiteWHITE86A and McCainMCCAIN90A. The method is summarized here, with emphasis given to the adaptations needed for application to the WWW.

Cocitation analysis has a fairly consistent sequence of steps, regardless of whether the objects of study are authors or journals, or indeed WWW sites. These steps (as described in McCainMCCAIN90A) consist of:

1. Selection of the core set of items for the study.
2. Retrieval of cocitation frequency information for the core set.
3. Compilation of the raw cocitation frequency matrix.
4. Correlation analysis to convert the raw frequencies into correlation coefficients.
5. Multivariate analysis of the correlation matrix, using principle components analysis, cluster analysis or multidimensional scaling techniques.
6. Interpretation of the resulting ``map'' and validation.

• Data Collection
• Data Analysis