Author Bibliographic Coupling Analysis

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.