A note and a correction on measuring cognitive distance in multiple dimensions
This is an incremental correction and clarification for researchers in bibliometrics or cognitive science.
The authors corrected terminology and a normalization error in previous methods for measuring cognitive distance, introducing 'similarity-adapted publication vectors' and emphasizing scale invariance, and found that three approaches yielded very similar results.
In a previous article (Rahman, Guns, Rousseau, and Engels, 2015) we described several approaches to determine the cognitive distance between two units. One of these approaches was based on what we called barycenters in N dimensions. The present note corrects this terminology and introduces the more adequate term 'similarity-adapted publication vectors'. Furthermore, we correct an error in normalization and explain the importance of scale invariance in determining cognitive distance. We also consider weighted cosine similarity as an alternative approach to determine cognitive (dis)similarity. Overall, we find that the three approaches (distance between barycenters, distance between similarity-adapted publication vectors, and weighted cosine similarity) yield very similar results.