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The article focuses on the structure of scientific literatures. The work developed directly from an earlier paper, which defined this measure and explored its relationship to other citation measures for identifying relationships among documents. Co-citation is defined as the number of times a pair of documents has been cited together in new papers. This contrast in strength between internal and external subculture linkages has led to conclusion that the structure of the microcenter can be reduced to two components. It was observed that the biomedical literature appears to be quite different from that of the physical sciences in that a relatively few papers, dealing with experimental procedures, tie together, through co-citation, nearly all biomedical documents in the file.

Sociologist C.H. Cooley's greatest contribution to sociological methodology is to be found in the article "The Roots of Social Knowledge," published in the July 1926 issue of the Journal of Sociology. In this research paper he shows definitely and once for all the great differences between the social and the physical sciences and the inadequacy of the method of the latter for the former; he also vindicates the right of the social sciences to be called sciences, even though their method is very different from that of the physical sciences. He points out that the distinctive trait of spatial knowledge is that it is mensurative, that of social knowledge is, that it is dramatic. As the former depends upon distinctions among our sensations of material objects, the latter is based ultimately upon perceptions of the intercommunicating behaviour of men and the experience of the processes of mind that go with it. Hence knowledge is both behaviouristic and sympathetic. Cooley believed, however, that fundamental agreement upon meanings in sociology can be made more precise by the careful use of language and thus transmission and accumulation of social knowledge exact enough for practical purposes is possible.