The ability to promptly recognise new research trends is strategic for many stakeholders, including universities, institutional funding bodies, academic publishers and companies. While the literature describes several approaches which aim to identify the emergence of new research topics early in their lifecycle, these rely on the assumption that the topic in question is already associated with a number of publications and consistently referred to by a community of researchers. Hence, detecting the emergence of a new research area at an embryonic stage, i.e., before the topic has been consistently labelled by a community of researchers and associated with a number of publications, is still an open challenge. In this paper, we begin to address this challenge by performing a study of the dynamics preceding the creation of new topics. This study indicates that the emergence of a new topic is anticipated by a significant increase in the pace of collaboration between relevant research areas, which can be seen as the 'parents' of the new topic. These initial findings (i) confirm our hypothesis that it is possible in principle to detect the emergence of a new topic at the embryonic stage, (ii) provide new empirical evidence supporting relevant theories in Philosophy of Science, and also (iii) suggest that new topics tend to emerge in an environment in which weakly interconnected research areas begin to cross-fertilise. Kuhn TS. 2012. The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Larsen PO, Von Ins M. 2010. The rate of growth in scientific publication and the decline in coverage provided by Science Citation Index. Scientometrics 84:575-603 Luce RD, Perry AD. 1949. A method of matrix analysis of group structure. Psychometrika
Using the Klink-2 algorithm to detect research areas, Salatino et al. REF show that the emergence of a scientific topic can be detected in an ''embryonic'' phase when weakly connected research areas start to interact.
How are topics born? Understanding the research dynamics preceding the emergence of new areas
PeerJ PrePrints
PeerJ PrePrints
Computer Science