Development of a journal recommendation tool based upon co-citation analysis of journals cited in Wageningen UR research articles

Abstract

Wageningen UR Library has developed a tool based upon co-citation analysis to recommend alternative journals to researchers for a journal they look up in the tool. The journal recommendations can be tuned in such a way to include citation preferences for each of the five science groups that comprise Wageningen UR. For the development of the tool we have looked at the reference lists of 18,490 research articles published in 2006-2013 by Wageningen UR staff in 2,530 peer reviewed journals covered by Web of Science. The total collected reference lists contains 795,585 references, of which 700,115 have been identified to articles in 10,712 unique journal titles. For the 700,115 references to these articles we have made an inventory of the co-occurrence (co-citation) of journals. The abundance of co-citations for these journals is calculated. We have included the results of the co-citation analysis of journals in a database that can function as a journal recommendation tool. With the tool, we can retrieve a list with frequencies of co-cited journals based on any journal that has been cited in Wageningen UR research articles. We surmise that frequently cocited journals are more similar in topic(s) and research field(s) because these journals together have been cited in the same article dealing with a particular topic within a certain research field. This list of co-cited journals provides suggestions on related journals that share topic(s) and research field(s). The tool presented in this paper is set up in an interactive way since it is based upon articles published by the researchers themselves. In case new articles will refer to other journals (because other topics and research fields are dealt with in new published articles) this will influence the co-citation analysis and result in recommendation of other journals.