Can Rough Co-citation Improve the Performance of Co-citation Clustering?

Co-citation clustering is often used for mapping science in the field of bibliometrics. It may be useful to utilize information from parsing the full-text of citing documents to obtain a more precise result of the clustering. Recently, "rough co-citation," which is weak co-citation relationship and can be used to indicate new related documents, has been proposed for scientific paper searches. Applying rough co-citation to the task of clustering will be beneficial. This study aims to explore whether rough co-citation can improve the performance of co-citation clustering. A clustering experiment is conducted to evaluate the effects of using rough co-citation. The experimental results indicate that the proposed technique, which uses both the original co-citation and the rough co-citation, tends to outperform the baseline technique, which only uses the original co-citation.