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Author Name Co-Mention Analysis: Testing a Poor Man's Author Co-Citation Analysis Method

As a social science information service for the German language countries, we document research projects, publications, and data in relevant fields. At the same time, we aim to provide well-founded bibliometric studies of these fields. Performing a citation analysis on an area of the German social sciences is, however, a serious challenge given the low and likely significantly biased coverage of these fields in the standard citation databases. Citations, and especially author citations, play a highly significant role in that literature, however. In this work in progress, we report preliminary methods and results for an author name co-mention analysis of a large fragment of a particularly interesting corpus of German sociology: a quarter century's worth of the full-text proceedings of the Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer Soziologie (DGS), which celebrated its 100th anniversary meeting in 2012. Results are encouraging for this poor cousin of author co-citation analysis, but considerable refinements, especially of the underlying computational infrastructure for full-text analysis, appear advisable for full-scale deployment of this method.