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Dynamics of topic formation and quantitative analysis of hot trends in physical science

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Abstract

Successful research in the face of increasing complexity of modern scientific knowledge together with diversity and depth of the studied problems requires an understanding of the structure and evolution of trends in science. Available digital records open wide possibilities for statistical analysis of scientific publications and related metadata for topic modeling and evolution, knowledge mapping, citation indexing, etc. We investigate dynamical properties of the physical topics using analysis of temporal evolution of proximity measure for word pairs related to the mutual information. We use full-text conceptualization of content of scientific documents provided by the ScienceWISE platform for topic mapping, trend analysis and detection of hot topics together with relevant papers retrieval. We found that time evolution of relative mutual information distance reveals a hidden topic structure and could be used for quantitative analysis of current trends in scientific research.

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  1. http://sciencewise.info/.

  2. https://arxiv.org/.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Stanislav Vilchynsky, Oleg Ruchaisky and Alexey Boiarskyi for their helpful discussion and suggestions and Andrey Magalich for his help with the data preparation. This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation Grant “Complex Information Network Manipulation” (SCOPES Grant IZ74Z0-160497/1).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, 64/13, Volodymyrska Street, Kiev, 01601, Ukraine

    A. V. Chumachenko & A. I. Yakimenko

  2. State Scientific Institution “Institute of Education Content Modernization”, 36, Mytropolyta Vasylia Lypkivskogo Str., Kiev, 03035, Ukraine

    B. G. Kreminskyi & A. I. Yakimenko

  3. Institute of Philology, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, 64/13, Volodymyrska Street, Kiev, 01601, Ukraine

    Iu. L. Mosenkis & A. I. Yakimenko

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  1. A. V. Chumachenko
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Authors must disclose all relationships or interests that could have direct or potential influence or impart bias on the work: AVC and AIY conceived the study. AVC designed the study and carried out the data analyses. AVC, AIY, BGK and ILM participated in the interpretation of data. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Chumachenko, A.V., Kreminskyi, B.G., Mosenkis, I.L. et al. Dynamics of topic formation and quantitative analysis of hot trends in physical science. Scientometrics 125, 739–753 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03610-6

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