The concept of bibliographic coupling was introduced by M. M. Kessler of MIT in a paper published in 1963,[3] and has been embraced in the work of the information scientist Eugene Garfield.
[4] It is one of the earliest citation analysis methods for document similarity computation and some have questioned its usefulness, pointing out that two works may reference completely unrelated subject matter in the third.
The co-citation analysis approach introduced by Henry Small and published in 1973 addressed this shortcoming of bibliographic coupling by considering a document's incoming citations to assess similarity, a measure that can change over time.
[6] In 1972 Robert Amsler published a paper[7] describing a measure for determining subject similarity between two documents by fusing bibliographic coupling and co-citation analysis.
[10] In summary, a chronological overview of citation analysis methods includes: Online sites that make use of bibliographic coupling include The Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies Archived 2011-06-07 at the Wayback Machine and CiteSeer.IST For an interesting summary of the progression of the study of citations see.