Cocited author retrieval online: An experiment with the social indicators literature

One mode of online retrieval in Scisearch or Social Scisearch involves entering pairs of authors' names believed to be jointly cited by subsequent writers and retrieving papers in which cocitations occur. Six pairs were formed with the names of four authors prominent in the social indicators movement (Bauer, Duncan, Land, and Sheldon). Documents by the four were not specified. It was thought that the pair Duncan and Land would retrieve papers in which indicator‐type data would be integrated with path‐analytic causal modeling. All other pairs seemed likely to retrieve a “general social indicators” literature. The 298 retrieved papers confirmed expectations. It was found that 121 papers generally cited social indicators (SI) documents by the input authors and frequently had SI language in their titles. Other signs of content also identified them as papers of the SI movement. The 177 papers retrieved on Duncan and Land generally cited causal modeling documents by the input pair and were path‐analytic in nature. As expected, they were relatively “harder” than the first group of papers, although the two groups are akin and are formally linked through citations in certain papers. An additional result is that papers citing at least three of the input authors tend to be overviews of the SI movement.