... million pairs of co-cited papers. This dictionary of co-cited core papers constitutes the main working file for research front identification. The clustering system developed by Henry Small is used.1 Pairs of documents that have been cited by the same source paper (co-cited) are extracted and then aggregated into clusters that have at least one document in common. We identify approximately 10,000 clusters or research fronts each year. Each cluster is randomly assigned a unique serial number. All of these procedures have been described in Current Contents(r) many times before.2 A detailed understanding of clustering, however, is not necessary for the practical use of research fronts in SciSearch(r)-Thomson Scientific's on-line system available on Dialog, DataStar, DIMDI, and STN. In the following pages, we describe ways to make use of the research fronts searching capability-whether for science policy or information retrieval. Research fronts are subspecialties-complex keywords, if you will-that are identified by ...

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