Scholarly network similarities: How bibliographic coupling networks, citation networks, cocitation networks, topical networks, coauthorship networks, and coword networks relate to each other

This study is motivated to explore the similarity among six types of scholarly networks aggregated at the institution level, including bibliographic coupling networks, citation networks, co-citation networks, topical networks, coauthorship networks, and co-word networks. Cosine distance is chosen to measure the similarities among the six networks. We find that topical networks and coauthorship networks have the lowest similarity; cocitation networks and citation networks have high similarity; bibliographic coupling networks and co-citation networks have high similarity; and co-word networks and topical networks have high similarity. In addition, through multidimensional scaling, two dimensions can be identified among the six networks: Dimension 1 can be interpreted as “citation-based vs. non-citation-based”, and Dimension 2 can be interpreted as “social vs. cognitive”. We recommend the use of hybrid or heterogeneous networks to study research interaction and scholarly communications.