The intellectual base and research fronts ofJASIS 1986-1990

A citation analysis was applied to articles published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science. The document set consisted of 209 genuine articles from the 1986–1990 SSCI® CD-ROM. To find the intellectual base of these articles a cocitation analysis was made. A map of the most cocited authors shows considerable resemblance to a map of information science produced by other methods. Citation-based bibliographic coupling was applied to the same set of documents in order to define research fronts, i.e., clusters of articles using similar parts of the intellectual base. It is also shown that the research front map has a close correspondence with the man of the intellectual base. © 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.