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Review on emerging research topics with key-route main path analysis

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Abstract

The fast development of the emerging research topics field results in hundreds of theoretical and empirical publications. However, to our knowledge, there is no comprehensive and objective literature review on this field until now. To this end, a citation network consisting of 1607 papers between 1965 and early 2019 is explored to discover the knowledge diffusion trajectory of the emerging research topics field by the key-route main path analysis approach, armed with the traversal weight of search path link count. From the convergence–divergence patterns in the local and global main paths, the development of emerging research topics field can be divided into three different stages: the emergence, exploration and development stages. In the meanwhile, several research drifts can also be observed: (1) from citation-based approaches to machine learning based ones, (2) from the measurement to the identification, and (3) from the papers to the patents. Finally, the directions of future research are suggested.

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  1. https://vpinstitute.org/academic-portal/tech-emergence-contest/.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported partially by the Social Science Foundation of Beijing Municipality (Grant Number 17GLB074), and Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province (Grant Number 2018A030313695). Our gratitude also goes to the anonymous reviewers and the editor for their valuable comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Base of Beijing Modern Manufacturing Development, College of Economics and Management, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing, 100124, People’s Republic of China

    Shuo Xu & Liyuan Hao

  2. School of Economics and Management, Beijing Forestry University, Beijing, 100083, People’s Republic of China

    Xin An

  3. Library, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, 518060, People’s Republic of China

    Hongshen Pang

  4. Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guangzhou, 510530, People’s Republic of China

    Ting Li

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Correspondence to Xin An.

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Xu, S., Hao, L., An, X. et al. Review on emerging research topics with key-route main path analysis. Scientometrics 122, 607–624 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03288-5

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