Research on the cross-citation relationship of core authors in scientometrics

Generally speaking, citation relationship among authors can be divided into 3 types: co-citation, coupling and cross-citation. Since author co-citation analysis was first introduced in 1982, it has been widely applied to study discipline structure, research state and research trends. Afterwards, conception of author bibliographic-coupling analysis was put forward and related empirical studies provided a method for mapping active authors in a research field for a more realistic picture of the current state of its research activities. Additionally, if one of author A’s papers has a citation from one of author B’s, there is cross-citation relationship between A and B. However, studies based on author cross-citation relationship mainly describe citation behaviors themselves using citation identity and citation image; they rarely involve any implicit knowledge communication, author research correlation or discovering academic communities. Author cross-citation analysis infers to both citing and cited phenomenon, which can be roughly correspond to citation identity and citation image. The study will further explore the author cross-citation relationship with core authors in scientometrics field as study object in order to provide reference for development of scientometrics field and in-depth application of citation analysis.