A Correlation Study of Co-opinion and Co-citation Similarity Measures

Co-citation forms a relational document network. Co-citation-based measures are found to be effective in retrieving relevant documents. However, they are far from ideal and need further enhancements. Co-opinion concept was proposed and tested in previous research and found to be effective in retrieving relevant documents. The present study endeavors to explore the correlation between opinion (dis)similarity measures and the traditional co-citation-based ones including Citation Proximity Index (CPI), co-citedness and co-citation context similarity. The results show significant, though weak to medium, correlations between the variables. The correlations are direct for co-opinion measure, while being inverse for the opinion distance. Accordingly, the two groups of measures are revealed to represent some similar aspects of the document relation. Moreover, the weakness of the correlations implies that there are different dimensions represented by the two groups