Experimental comparison of first and second-order similarities in a scientometric context

  • Authors:

  • Cristian Colliander;Per Ahlgren

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Sociology, Inforsk, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden 901 87;Department of Sociology, Inforsk, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden 901 87 and Department of e-Resources, University Library, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden 106 91

  • Venue:
  • Scientometrics
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

The measurement of similarity between objects plays a role in several scientific areas. In this article, we deal with document---document similarity in a scientometric context. We compare experimentally, using a large dataset, first-order with second-order similarities with respect to the overall quality of partitions of the dataset, where the partitions are obtained on the basis of optimizing weighted modularity. The quality of a partition is defined in terms of textual coherence. The results show that the second-order approach consistently outperforms the first-order approach. Each difference between the two approaches in overall partition quality values is significant at the 0.01 level.