A new methodological approach to bibliographic coupling and its application to the national, regional and institutional level

In an earlier study the authors have shown that bibliographic coupling techniques can be used to identify 'hot' research topics. The methodology is based on appropriate thresholds for both number of related documents and the strength of bibliographic links. Those papers are called core documents that have more than 9 links of at Least the strength 0.25 according to Salton's measure, provided they are articles, notes or reviews. This choice resulted in a selection of nearly one per cent of all papers of the above types recorded in the 1992 annual cumulation of the SCI. Core documents proved important nodes in the network of documented science communication. In the present study, the set of core documents is analysed by journals, subfields and corporate addresses. The latter analysis is conducted on both national and regional-institutional level. First all countries which have published at least 20 core documents in 1992 are investigated in terms of their research profiles, their international collaboration patterns and their citation impact. Finally, those eight members of the European Union which have published at least 20 core documents in 1992 are analysed in respect of regional and institutional distribution of core documents.