Abstract
This article describes an analysis of keywords which was aimed at revealing publication patterns in the field of renewable energy, including the temporal evolution of its different research lines over the last two decades. To this end, we first retrieved the records of the sample, then we processed the keywords to resolve their obvious problems of synonymy and to limit the study to those most used. The final results showed a clear increase in scientific production related to alternative energies, and a structure corresponding to five major clusters which, at a finer level of resolution, were decomposed into 22. We analyzed the structure of the clusters and their temporal evolution, paying particular attention to uncovering the bursty periods of the different lines of research.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Archambault, É., Campbell, D., Gingras, Y., & Larivière, V. (2009). Comparing bibliometric statistics obtained from the web of science and scopus. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), 60(7), 1320–1326.
Callon, M., Courtial, J. P., & Laville, F. (1991). Co-word analysis as a tool for describing the network of interactions between basic and technological research: the case of polymer chemistry. Scientometrics, 22(1), 153–203.
Callon, M., Courtial, J. P., & Penan, H. (1995). Cienciometría. El estudio cuantitativo de la actividad científica: de la bibliometría a la vigencia tecnológica. Gijón: Ediciones TREA.
Chen, Y. H., Chen, C. Y., & Lee, S. C. (2010). Technology forecasting of new clean energy: the example of hydrogen energy and fuel cell. African Journal of Business Management, 4(7), 1372–1380.
Corera Álvarez, E., & Moya-Anegón, F. (2009). Chemistry in Spain: bibliometric analysis through Scopus. Chemistry Today, 27(6), 61–64.
Ding, Y., Chowdhury, G. G., & Foo, S. (2001). Bibliometric cartography of information retrieval research by using co-word analysis. Information Processing and Management, 37(6), 817–842.
Fu, H. Z., Ho, Y. S., Sui, Y. M., & Li, Z. S. (2010). A bibliometric analysis of solid waste research during the period 1993–2008. Waste Management, 30(12), 2410–2417.
Girvan, M., & Newman, M. E. J. (2002). Community structure in social and biological networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 99(12), 7821–7826.
Gorraiz, J., Gumpenberger, C., & Wieland, M. (2011). Galton 2011 revisited: a bibliometric journey in the footprints of a universal genius. Scientometrics, 88(2), 627–652.
Guerrero-Bote, V. P., Gómez-Crisostomo, R., Romo-Fernández, L. M., & Moya-Anegón, F. (2009). Visibility and responsibility of women in research papers through the order of signatures: the case of the University of Extremadura (1990–2005). Scientometrics, 81, 225–238.
Hane, P. (2004). Elsevier announces Scopus service. Information today, http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/nbreader.asp?ArticleID=16494. Accessed 9 June 2011.
Jacso, P. (2011). The h-index, h-core citation rate and the bibliometric profile of the Scopus database. Online Information Review, 35(3), 492–501.
Kajikawa, Y., Yoshikawa, J., Takeda, Y., & Matsushima, K. (2008). Tracking emerging technologies in energy research: toward a roadmap for sustainable energy. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 75, 771–782.
Kleinberg, J. (2002). Bursty and hierarchical structure in streams, Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGKDD international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining (pp. 91–101). New York: ACM.
Kleinberg, J. (2004). Temporal dynamics of on-line information streams. In M. Garofalakis, J. Gehrke, & R. Rastogi (Eds.), Data stream management: processing high-speed data streams. Berlin: Springer.
Leydesdorff, L., Moya Anegón, F., & Guerrero Bote, V. P. (2010). Journal maps on the basis of Scopus data: a comparison with the journal citation reports of the ISI. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 61(2), 352–369.
Liu, X. J., Zhang, L. A., & Hong, S. (2011). Global biodiversity research during 1900–2009: a bibliometric analysis. Biodiversity and Conservation, 20(4), 807–826.
López, Illescas C., de Moya Anegón, F., & Moed, H. F. (2008). The actual citation impact of European oncological research. European Journal of Cancer, 44, 228–236.
Mane, K., & Börner, K. (2004). Mapping topics and topic bursts in PNAS. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 101(Suppl.1), 5287–5290.
Miguel, S., Chinchilla-Rodriguez, Z., & Moya-Anegón, F. (2011). Open access and Scopus: a new approach to scientific visibility from the standpoint of access. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 62(6), 1130–1145.
Moya Anegón, F., Chinchilla Rodríguez, Z., Vargas Quesada, B., Corera Álvarez, E., Muñoz Fernández, F. J., González Molina, A., et al. (2007). Coverage analysis of Scopus: a journal metric approach. Scientometrics, 73(1), 53–78.
Neff, M. W., & Corley, E. A. (2009). 35 years and 160,000 articles: a bibliometric exploration of the evolution of ecology. Scientometrics, 80(3), 657–682.
Pickering, B. (2004). Elsevier prepares Scopus to rival ISI Web of science, Information world review. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Romo-Fernández, L. M., López-Pujalte, C., Guerrero-Bote, V. P., & Moya-Anegón, F. (2011). Analysis of Europe’s scientific production on renewable energies. Renewable Energy, 36(9), 2529–2537.
Romo-Fernández, L. M., Guerrero-Bote, V. P., Moya-Anegón, F. (2012). World scientific production on renewable energy, sustainability and the environment. Energy for Sustainable Development, 16, 500–508.
Sammon, J. (1969). A nonlinear mapping for data structure analysis. IEEE Transactions on Computers, 18(5), 401–409.
Suk, F. M., Lien, G. S., Yu, T. C., & Ho, Y. S. (2011). Global trends in Helicobacter pylori research from 1991 to 2008 analyzed with the Science Citation Index Expanded. European Journal of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, 23(4), 295–301.
Tanakaa, H., & Ho, Y. S. (2011). Global trends and performances of desalination research. Desalination and Water Treatment, 25(1–3), 1–12.
Van Eck, N. J., & Waltman, L. (2010a). Software survey: VOSviewer, a computer program for bibliometric mapping. Scientometrics, 84(2), 523–538.
Van Eck, N. J., & Waltman, L. (2010b). A comparison of two techniques for bibliometric mapping: multi-dimensional scaling and VOS. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 61(12), 2405–2416.
Viedma del Jesus, M. I., Perakakis, P., Muñoz, M. A., López-Herrera, A. G., & Vila, J. (2011). Sketching the first 45 years of the journal Psychophysiology (1964–2008): a co-word-based analysis. Psychophysiology, 48(8), 1029–1036.
Woon, W. L., Henschel, A. & Madnick, S. (2009). A framework for technology forecasting and visualization. 2009 International conference on innovations in information technology, IIT ‘09, pp 155–159.
Acknowledgments
Funding
This work was financed by the Junta de Extremadura—Consejería de Educación Ciencia & Tecnología and the Fondo Social Europeo as part of predoctoral studentship PRE07051 and the research group grant GR10019, and by the Plan Nacional de Investigación Científica, Desarrollo e Innovación Tecnológica 2008-2011 and the Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER) as part of research projects TIN2008-06514-C02-01 and TIN2008-06514-C02-02.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Romo-Fernández, L.M., Guerrero-Bote, V.P. & Moya-Anegón, F. Co-word based thematic analysis of renewable energy (1990–2010). Scientometrics 97, 743–765 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-1009-5
Received:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-1009-5