The The Coupler: a new bibliometric tool for relational citation, bibliographic coupling and co-citation analysis

Abstract

Introduction: The use of programming languages in the context of Metric Information Studies has been gaining ground with the scientific community in the area due to its practicality, gratuitousness and possibly low computational cost. Objective: Presents a new, free and alternative, bibliometric tool, focused on relational citation analysis, focusing on bibliographic coupling, built on the R programming language, entitled The Coupler. It also tests the tool using different data commonly used in bibliometric analyzes and demonstrates its use. Methodology: It bases the relational analysis of citation, co-citation and bibliographic coupling from a mathematical point of view and presents the source code of the tool and the conditions in which it was built and made available to the public. For testing the tool, it uses generic data and exposes all its features. For demonstration of use with real data, it operates bibliometric, patentometric, altmetric and natural language data. Results: The tool is able to build citation, coupling and co-citation matrices in addition to calculating normalized values ​​via Salton's Cosine and Jaccard Index of bibliographic coupling frequencies. Furthermore, it builds the bibliographic coupling network and identifies the coupling units responsible for each coupling pair. The latter, an unusual result to traditional bibliometric softwares. Conclusion: It concludes that the tool behaves in an expected and satisfactory way when processing both generic data and bibliometric, patentometric, altmetric and natural language data. Among the results, the main result, and differential from the other software, is the identification of coupling units, as well as the calculation of normalized coupling frequencies via Salton's Cosine and Jaccard Index.