Venue-author-coupling: A measure for identifying disciplines through author communities

author communities Chaoqun Ni, Cassidy R. Sugimoto, and Jiepu Jiang Abstract Conceptualizations of disciplinarity often focus on the social aspects of disciplines; that is, disciplines are defined by the set of individuals who participate in their activities and communications. However, operationalizations of disciplinarity often demarcate the boundaries of disciplines by standard classification schemes which may be inflexible to changes in the participation profile of that discipline. To address this limitation, a metric called venue-authorcoupling is proposed and illustrated using journals from the Journal Citation Report’s Information Science & Library Science category. As Journal Citation Reports are some of the most frequently used categories in bibliometric analyses, this allows for an examination of the extent to which the journals in Journal Citation Report categories can be considered as proxies for disciplines. By extending the idea of bibliographic coupling, venue-author-coupling identifies similarities among journals based on the similarities of their author profiles. The employment of this method using Information Science & Library Science journals provides evidence of four distinct sub-fields, i.e. management information systems, specialized information and library science, library science focused, and information science focused research. The proposed venueauthor-coupling method provides a novel way to examine disciplinarity from the perspective of author communities.