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Changelog

Source: NEWS.md

biblionetwork (development version)

  • No change yet since 0.2.0 (released on CRAN on 4 November 2026).

biblionetwork 0.2.0

CRAN release: 2026-11-04

Changes of the interface

  • biblio_coupling() is now the general coupling function, with a method argument ("angle", "strength", "similarity", "jaccard", "vladutz"). The former biblio_coupling() (the coupling angle of Sen and Gan, 1983) is renamed coupling_angle(). Calls that leave method at its default and name their other arguments give the same result; a call passing normalized_weight_only by position (4th argument) must now name it, since method comes first.
  • coupling_entity() is renamed entity_network() and is deprecated (it still works, with the former method names): it is not a measure of its own, but the aggregation of the coupling measures at the level of entities. It now accepts all the methods of biblio_coupling() ("angle", "strength", "similarity", "jaccard", "vladutz"; the last two with the minimum rule of Zhao and Strotmann by analogy, not taken from the paper) and a network argument, "coupling" or "cocitation".
  • compute_couplings() accepts methods = "descriptive" ([coupling_descriptive()]), not computed by default: it informs the user of its cost and of the fact that its pairs differ, and needs title (further arguments in descriptive_args).
  • merge_weights() now adds the rank of each pair under each measure (rank_<name>, computed on the pairs present in all the tables) and the rank_gap between two measures; the vignettes use it to find the pairs on which two measures disagree.

Bug fixes

  • Identifiers stored as factors with different levels made every function fail (“level sets of factors are different”): they are now turned into characters.
  • coupling_descriptive() returned a pair of documents twice when both were targets (weights equal up to floating-point error, so unique() kept both).
  • coupling_similarity() was wrong in two ways. The idf of every reference was computed from the first reference of the table only (nb_doc was a one-cell table, recycled with its first value), so that the weights were proportional to those of coupling_strength(). And the denominator was the product of the informational lengths instead of its square root, so that the measure was not the cosine of Shen et al. (2019, Eq. 8) that the documentation announced. It now computes sum_shared idf / sqrt(S(A) S(B)), a cosine bounded by 1, checked against the formula and the worked example of the paper.
  • coupling_strength() computed N (the number of documents) after removing the references cited once, forgetting the documents without any shared reference. N now counts all the citing documents, as documented: weights change slightly (about 2% on average on the stagflation data).
  • coupling_entity() used a global min() instead of the element-wise pmin() for the number of times two entities cite a reference: the weights were wrong as soon as an entity cited several references several times.
  • biblio_cocitation(normalized_weight_only = FALSE, output_in_character = FALSE) failed (wrong column name).
  • biblio_coupling(), biblio_cocitation(), coupling_strength(), coupling_similarity(), coupling_entity() and coauth_network() failed with “only 0’s may be mixed with negative subscripts” when no pair of nodes was linked; they now return a zero-row table with the usual columns, and a warning (class biblionetwork_no_edges) that says whether nothing is shared or the weight_threshold is too high (with the largest number of shared items found).
  • dt[unique(id_art)] was a keyed join on the reference identifier, which counted wrongly the documents if a document identifier was also a reference identifier; replaced by uniqueN().

Speed and memory

  • The coupling and co-citation functions now compute the pairs with sparse matrices (Matrix) instead of listing, for each reference, all the pairs of documents citing it. A pair sharing k references used to be stored k times, with its identifiers, before being counted; it is now stored once, as integers. On a sample of 30,000 Scopus documents (830,000 citations, 4.5 million edges), biblio_coupling() went from 12.9 s and 7.1 GB of memory to 4.3 s and 0.8 GB; computing the five measures with compute_couplings() takes 5.7 s and 1.0 GB. The results are unchanged (checked against the former implementation on the stagflation data and against slow reference implementations in the tests).
  • coupling_entity() and coauth_network() use sparse matrices too (for the entity measures, min(a, b) is written as the number of levels reached by both entities, which turns the sum of minima into a cross-product). Coupling the 35 journals of a sample of 830,000 citations takes about 3 s and 0.8 GB.
  • The lengths of bibliographies are now numeric: products of two large lengths (entities such as journals) used to overflow the integer range and give NA weights.

New functions

Other changes

  • The document-level coupling functions share one internal engine (R/coupling_core.R).
  • A new vignette, comparing_measures, compares all the measures on the stagflation corpus.
  • New internal helpers (R/utils.R) shared by all the functions: the input is checked with informative cli errors (missing columns, wrong arguments), rows with missing identifiers are dropped with a warning, and the pairs are built in one place.
  • coauth_network(): an unknown method is now an error instead of silently using the refined fractional counting.
  • First test suite (testthat 3): hand-computed toy examples, invariants, cross-checks with a slow implementation, and tests on samples of the authors’ Scopus and Web of Science databases (skipped where the databases are absent).
  • The package now depends on R >= 4.1.0 and imports cli, rlang and Matrix.

biblionetwork 0.1.1

  • Use of lifecycle to manage the life cycle of the package
  • Creation of a package-level documentation to add dependency in a centralized way
  • Adding repository on Zenodo and adding the DOI badge

biblionetwork 0.1.0

CRAN release: 2021-04-09

  • This is the first release of the biblionetwork package