The Structure of Scientific Literatures II: Toward a Macro- and Microstructure for Science

Abstract

Part I of this paperl described the first steps in mapping the scientific literature, using a new technique-co-citation-to measure the degree of similarity among documents. The work developed directly from an earlier paper2 which defined this measure, and explored its relationship to other citation measures for identifying relationships among documents. We now report the outcome of an attempt to create 'maps' of the scientific literature. The scales of these maps have been systematically manipulated so that they present, not only an overview of all highly-cited papers in natural science, but