Spread co-citation relationship as a measure for document retrieval

This paper proposes a measure that uses a spread co-citation relationship for document retrieval. To clarify whether this proposed measure has potential for enhancing the search performance of co-citation searching, two retrieval methods are evaluated: one uses the relationship directly; the other incorporates the co-citation context. Experiments with a special test collection comprising about 152,000 documents are conducted. Results indicate that this relationship tends to be able to detect relevant documents which are undetectable using a traditional co-citation relationship, and that using context has a positive effect to reduce the number of noise documents.