Some Comments on the Question Whether Co-Occurrence Data Should Be Normalized
9 Pages Posted: 12 Apr 2007
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Some Comments on the Question Whether Co-Occurrence Data Should Be Normalized
Some Comments on the Question Whether Co-Occurrence Data Should Be Normalized
Date Written: March 28, 2007
Abstract
In a recent paper in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Leydesdorff and Vaughan assert that raw cocitation data should be analyzed directly, without first applying a normalization like the Pearson correlation. In this report, it is argued that there is nothing wrong with the widely adopted practice of normalizing cocitation data. One of the arguments put forward by Leydesdorff and Vaughan turns out to depend crucially on incorrect multidimensional scaling maps that are due to an error in the PROXSCAL program in SPSS.
Keywords: Multidimensional scaling, Author cocitation analysis, Co-occurrence data, Normalization, PROXSCAL, Pearson correlation
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