Subject Similarities and Citation Similarities: A Study on Library and Information Science Dissertations

The aim of this research is to discover the relation between citations of documents and subject related dissertations in library and information science. In this study citations are used as content descriptors of documents. A comparison has been made between subject related and citation related documents to explore the degree of capability of citations to bring together subject related documents. A measure of relatedness was computed between each pair of dissertations based on number of overlapping citations. For this aim, we used library and information science dissertation abstracts subject categorization as a base for categorization of studied dissertations. Degree of subject similarity was measured by title keywords and degree of citation similarity was measured by overlapping citations among them. It is shown that the dissertations which have more overlapping citations, have less subject similarity. Therefore, there is a weak correlation between the two types of subject grouping and citation grouping of documents.