Abstract
In this research, we propose a method to trace scientist’s research trends realtimely. By monitoring the downloads of scientific articles in the journal of Scientometrics for 744 h, 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 downloads 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, and open access are emerging fields that scientometrics researchers are focusing on.
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Acknowledgments
The research is supported by the project of “Social Science Foundation of China”(Grant No. 10CZX011), the project of “Specialized Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education of China” (Grant No. 2009041110001), as well as the project of “Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities” (Grant No. DUT12RW309).
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Z. Wang and S. Xu contributed equally as second authors.
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Wang, X., Wang, Z. & Xu, S. Tracing scientist’s research trends realtimely. Scientometrics 95, 717–729 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-012-0884-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-012-0884-5