Co-Citation Analysis of Articles Published in Substance Abuse Journals: Intellectual Structure and Research Fields (2001-2012).

The purpose of this study is to introduce a new methodology in the field of substance abuse, namely, co-citation analysis, which uses the bibliographic references of publications to establish the main thematic areas being researched and to identify the seminal documents that have contributed to establishing the intellectual foundation of the discipline at the present time.We identified all bibliographic references that were cited in documents published in the substance abuse journals included in the Journal Citation Reports in the 2001-2012 period, generating a co-citation matrix. This matrix was used to perform a co-citation network analysis.The co-citation network analysis led to the iden…