Subject relationship between articles determined by co-occurrence of keywords in citing and cited titles

Abstract

It is assumed that a paper which cites an earlier document shares a subject relationship with that particular document. In order to determine if this assumption is valid, a study was conducted by analysing 1000 articles from the Science Citation Index k and Social Sciences Citation Inde®. These articles were selected in ten different disciplines by using a purposive sampling technique. Various Spearman's Correlation Coefficient tests were computed to find out if a subject relationship existed between the Articles which have the same keywords in their titles (Parent Articles and Related Records). Through the analysis the hypothesis has been veri fied showing that there is a relationship between the articles which are citing the same references. This was determined by co-occurrences of the same keywords among the shared refer ences. However, there are some unique differences in the science and the social science disciplines that exist in these two databases.