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Scientific relatedness in solar energy: a comparative study between the USA and China

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Abstract

In this paper, we make use of keywords in scientific articles in solar energy during the period 2000–2013 to investigate scientific relatedness at the topic level (i.e. relatedness between topic and topic) and the country level (i.e. relatedness between topic and country). The bibliometric analyses show that both publications and knowledge topics exhibit significant rise, and China has exceeded the USA and developed into the largest scientific producer after 2010. We determine the degree of relatedness by means of the topics co-occurrence network and explore the evolving dynamic processes of scientific relatedness which indicates decreasing patterns in the two countries. The results also highlight differences between the research directions in the USA and China: in the USA “energy efficiency and environment” prove more developed, while in China “solar power” shows more central. This study assesses the extent to which the scientific relatedness exerts influence on the literature productivity at the country level. We find negative relationships between scientific relatedness and publications in both of countries. Our work has potential implications for the future policies with respect to the innovative research in the solar energy field.

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Acknowledgments

This study is supported by a grant from National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 71373254). The authors are very grateful for the valuable comments and suggestions from the anonymous reviewers and Editor-in-Chief of the journal, which significantly improved the quality and readability of the paper.

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  1. School of Management, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, People’s Republic of China

    Jingjing Zhang, Yan Yan & Jiancheng Guan

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  1. Jingjing Zhang
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Correspondence to Jiancheng Guan.

Appendix: Retrieval profiles for solar energy

Appendix: Retrieval profiles for solar energy

TS = (“solar energy*” OR “solar radiation” OR “solar cell*” OR “solar photovoltaic*” OR “solar power” OR “solar heat*” OR “solar plant*” OR “solar concentrate*” OR “solar thermal” OR “solar collect*” OR “solar technolog*”) AND PY = (2000–2013) Refined by: Document Type = (ARTICLE) AND [excluding] Web of Science Categories = (HORTICULTURE OR PLANT SCIENCES OR FORESTRY) Databases = SCIEXPANDED,SSCI, CPCI-S, CPCI-SSH Timespan = 2000–2013 Lemmatization = On.

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Zhang, J., Yan, Y. & Guan, J. Scientific relatedness in solar energy: a comparative study between the USA and China. Scientometrics 102, 1595–1613 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-014-1487-0

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