方法对比

	Main Path Analysis	Author Co-Citation Analysis (ACA)
领域	文献计量学	文献计量学
方法族	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
起源年份	1989	1981
提出者	Norman P. Hummon & Patrick Doreian	Howard D. White & Belver C. Griffith; later Howard D. White & Katherine W. McCain
类型	Citation-network traversal pipeline for knowledge trajectories	Science-mapping pipeline using authors as units of analysis
开创性文献	Hummon, N. P., & Doreian, P. (1989). Connectivity in a citation network: The development of DNA theory. Social Networks, 11(1), 39-63.	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.
别名	MPA, Citation Main Path Analysis, Knowledge Flow Path Analysis	ACA, Author Co-Citation Mapping, Cited-Author Co-Citation Analysis
相关	3	3
摘要	Main path analysis (MPA) traces the principal trajectory of knowledge development through a citation network. Introduced by Norman Hummon and Patrick Doreian in their 1989 study of the discovery of DNA, the method treats a field's literature as a directed acyclic graph in which documents point backward in time to the work they cite. Rather than mapping the whole network, MPA weights each citation link by how central it is to the flow of ideas — how many knowledge-carrying paths run through it — and then extracts the chain of most-traversed links from the field's earliest sources to its most recent sinks. The result is a compact 'main path': an ordered sequence of papers that represents the backbone along which a research front actually developed.	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.