Bibliographic Coupling is one of the earliest statistical methods used to analyze scientific production and map scientific structure at different granularity levels. While many authors consider it a measure of semantic similarity, the questions as to “when and to what extent bibliographic coupling can be considered a measure of semantic similarity has not still needs to be established theoretically. Based on an analysis of the correlation between coupling strength and semantic distances of all 2015 economics articles included in the Web of Science database, the present paper shows that the semantic scope of these articles is very limited, thus putting into question the use of bibliographic coupling as a semantic similarity measure
