Science Daily October 24, 2019
An international team of researchers (Japan, Taiwan) used bibliometric analyses targeting data of about 30 million published articles from 1970 to 2017 on PubMed to test their hypothesis that existing emerging topics contribute to the generation of new emerging topics in that field. They collected emerging keywords from medical subject headings attached to each article and performed co-word analyses of each emerging keyword 1-year prior to it becoming an emerging keyword. About 75% of total emerging keywords, at 1-year prior to becoming identified as emerging, co-appeared with other emerging keywords in the same article. Most of the keywords co-appeared again at the point when the target keyword was identified as emerging, which is consistent with our hypothesis regarding the mechanism that emerging topics generate emerging topics. Clarifying how emerging topics in science and technology research fields are generated is useful for both researchers and agencies to identify potential emerging topics of the future…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE