Word bibliographic coupling: Another way to map science field and identify core references.

This study investigates how to measure subject relationship based on bibliographic coupling strength. Since the 1960s, researchers use citation analysis methods to discover the relationship between different works and authors. However, how to apply citation‐based methods in measuring the relationships between various subjects remains unknown. We propose a novel method to measure relationships between subjects based on bibliographic coupling strengths. Our dataset is composed of 7,692 articles published in 10 core information science journals from 2008 to 2017. The result shows that our method provides another viewpoint of exploring the development of science. Furthermore, our method can identify the core works in different subjects and help to judge how similar different subjects are. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]