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Previous commonly used author co-citation analysis (ACA) methods have limited the ability to deal with accidental co-citation in constructing a raw co-citation matrix. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to propose a new method, called author tri-citation analysis (ATA), to better map knowledge domains and depict scientific intellectual structures.

Different from the previous method of using ACA that captures author co-citation relationships, the ATA method seeks tri-citation relationships among authors. Compared with ACA, ATA can ignore some accidental co-citation relationships between authors and can improve the accuracy of mapping knowledge domains.

Although ATA does not mine more sub-fields than ACA does, the results of the empirical studies show that ATA, the newly proposed method, performs better in knowledge domain maps based on publications in the field of computer science.

The definition of ATA in this article is simple and still insufficiently informative. Many other pieces of information can be involved; for example, all authors’ information, authors’ sequence in the author list, reference published time and similar. These can be enhanced in future studies.

This research will enrich the methods of mapping knowledge domains due to its new perspective.

Knowledge domain mapping is important to understand a discipline, and this research provides more potential methods for this, which benefits the performance of the maps.

ATA can provide a methodological awareness for mapping knowledge domains. This value lies in not only a tri-citation perspective, but also author bibliographic tripling and author tri-operation perspectives (“tri-” perspectives).

The purpose of this paper is to study the status of studies on capital structure determinants in the past 40 years. This paper highlights the major gaps in the literature on determinants of capital structure and also aims to raise specific questions for future research.

The prominence of research is assessed by studying the year of publication and region, level of economic development, firm size, data collection methods, data analysis techniques and theoretical models of capital structure from the selected papers. The review is based on 167 papers published from 1972 to 2013 in various peer-reviewed journals. The relationship of determinants of capital structure is analyzed with the help of meta-analysis.

Major findings show an increase of interest in research on determinants of capital structure of the firms located in emerging markets. However, it is observed that these regions are still under-examined which provides more scope for research both empirical and survey-based studies. Majority of research studies are conducted on large-sized firms by using secondary data and regression-based models for the analysis, whereas studies on small-sized firms are very meager. As majority of the research papers are written only at the organizational level, the impact of leverage on various industries is yet to be examined. The review highlights the major determinants of capital structure and their relationship with leverage. It also reveals the dominance of pecking order theory in explaining capital structure of firms theoretically as well as statistically.

The paper covers a considerable period of time (1972-2013). Among very few review papers on capital structure research, to the best of authors’ knowledge; this is the first review to identify what is missing in the literature on the determinants of capital structure while offering recommendations for future studies. It also synthesize the findings of empirical studies on determinants of capital structure statistically.

Many information scientists are concerned with the operation of document retrieval systems serving scientists in various fields. The scientists served by these systems are often members of what have been called invisible colleges, groups of scientists in frequent communication with one another and involved with highly specialized subject matters. Often such groups are considered to share an intellectual perspective regarding this subject matter, which is sometimes referred to as a paradigm.