Co-Citation

Co-Citation in Legal Information Retrieval

The following is a basic concept of Co-Citation in relation to information retrieval. In addition to this, Co-Citation may be applied to legal texts, including case law, legislation and scholarly works. Like bibliographic coupling, co-citation is a form of clustering based on reference citations. In co-citation clustering, however, clusters are not based on reference citations shared by documents (as in bibliographic coupling) but on two or more documents being cited together in a subsequent document. If new papers, hot off the press, frequently cite both documents A and B, then, the reasoning goes, documents A and B must be related, and the more often documents are co-cited (cited together in later documents), then the closer the relationship is. Because new documents keep coming out, with different sets of reference citations, the co-citation clusters keep changing over time, showing new patterns of emerging relationships among documents, authors, and the topics they address. This constant change, incorporating new citation patterns, is the basis of the claim (or hope) of its proponents that these co-citation clusters can identify hot topics and emerging research fronts..