Tracing scientist's research trends realtimely

TL;DR

This paper introduces a real-time method for tracking scientific research trends by analyzing article and keyword downloads over a month, revealing emerging focus areas in scientometrics.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach combining download statistics and keyword analysis to detect emerging research trends in real-time.

Findings

Identification of emerging fields like social media and webometrics

Detection of new indices such as g-index for scientific productivity

Real-time monitoring of research trend evolution

Abstract

In this research, we propose a method to trace scientists' research trends realtimely. By monitoring the downloads of scientific articles in the journal of Scientometrics for 744 hours, namely one month, we investigate the download statistics. Then we aggregate the keywords in these downloaded research papers, and analyze the trends of article downloading and keyword downloading. Furthermore, taking both the download of keywords and articles into consideration, we design a method to detect the emerging research trends. We find that in scientometrics field, social media, new indices to quantify scientific productivity (g-index), webometrics, semantic, text mining, open access are emerging fields that scientometrics researchers are focusing on.