Compare methods

	Author Bibliographic Coupling Analysis	Author Co-Citation Analysis (ACA)
Field	Bibliometrics	Bibliometrics
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2008	1981
Originator	Dangzhi Zhao & Andreas Strotmann	Howard D. White & Belver C. Griffith; later Howard D. White & Katherine W. McCain
Type	Science-mapping pipeline coupling authors by shared references	Science-mapping pipeline using authors as units of analysis
Seminal source	Zhao, D., & Strotmann, A. (2008). Evolution of research activities and intellectual influences in information science 1996-2005: Introducing author bibliographic-coupling analysis. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 59(13), 2070-2086.	White, H. D., & Griffith, B. C. (1981). Author cocitation: A literature measure of intellectual structure. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 32(3), 163-171.
Aliases	ABCA, Author-Level Bibliographic Coupling, Coupling of Authors by Shared References	ACA, Author Co-Citation Mapping, Cited-Author Co-Citation Analysis
Related	3	3
Summary	Author bibliographic coupling analysis (ABCA) maps the current intellectual structure of a field by linking authors through the references they share. Introduced by Dangzhi Zhao and Andreas Strotmann in 2008, the method extends classic bibliographic coupling — which couples two documents when they cite the same earlier work — up to the level of authors: two authors are coupled to the degree that their bodies of work draw on the same references. Because coupling is fixed at the moment of publication and reflects what authors are reading and building on right now, ABCA captures the active research front and the intellectual affinities among currently productive authors, complementing author co-citation analysis, which instead reflects a field's slowly accumulating, more retrospective base of cited authorities.	Author co-citation analysis (ACA) maps the intellectual structure of a research field by treating authors, rather than documents, as the units of analysis. Introduced by Howard White and Belver Griffith in 1981, ACA rests on a simple premise: when two authors are repeatedly cited together in the same later papers, the community of citers is signaling that their work is intellectually related. By counting these co-citations across a body of literature, assembling them into an author-by-author matrix, converting that matrix into similarities, and projecting it into a low-dimensional map, ACA recovers the 'specialties' or schools of thought that organize a discipline and shows how they relate to one another. White and McCain's 1998 study of information science, which mapped 120 leading authors over more than two decades, became the canonical demonstration of the method and established its workflow.