Authors' co-citation analysis: an application on subject indexing studies

Abstract

This study presents the subject indexing evaluation as a tool that enables the continuous improvement of information systems through improvement of subject indexing. This raises the need to place the studies on subject indexing evaluation, locating its core researchers and ideological schools. The research aimed at identifying the Brazilian production on the theme subject indexing evaluation and performing authors' co-citation analysis in order to understand the dialogue between the researchers that work with this theme. For this purpose, we conducted a theoretical study on subject indexing and subject indexing evaluation, as well as a bibliometric study of scientific collaboration supported by authors' co-citation analysis. We found that there is a growing interest in this topic in Information Science. The social network analysis allowed the visualization of the presence of three mainstreams of thematic information processing influencing Brazilian literature in the field, with emphasis on two authors: Lancaster and Chaumier.