Publication authorship: A new approach to the bibliometric study of scientific work and beyond

Bibliometric studies offer numerous ways of analyzing scientific work. For example, co-citation and bibliographic coupling networks have been widely used since the 1960s to describe the segmentation of research and to look the development of the scientific frontier. In addition, co-authorship and collaboration networks have been employed for more than 30 years to explore the social dimension of scientific work. This paper introduces publication authorship as a complement to these established approaches. Three data sets of academic articles from accounting, astronomy, and gastroenterology are used to illustrate the benefits of publication authorship for bibliometric studies. In comparison to bibliographic coupling, publication authorship produces significantly better intra-cluster cosine similarities across all data sets, which in the end yields a more fine-grained picture of the research field in question. Beyond this finding, publication authorship lends itself to other types of documents such as corporate reports or meeting minutes to study organizations, movements, or any other concerted activity.