Clarivate Plc, a global leader in providing trusted information and insights to accelerate the pace of innovation, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) have released the “Research Fronts 2021” report, to identify the hottest and emerging areas in the world of scientific research. This is the eighth annual collaborative report between the two parties and it was launched at a joint forum in Beijing.
“Research Fronts 2021” identified 171 research fronts, including 110 hot and 61 emerging fronts in 11 broad research areas in sciences and social sciences. Research Fronts are formed when clusters of highly cited papers are frequently cited together, reflecting a specific commonality in the research – sometimes experimental data, a method, a concept or a hypothesis. Around one third of the Research Fronts identified this year are related to COVID-19. These include six among the top 10 Research Fronts in clinical medicine and three among the top 10 Research Fronts in biological sciences. The research being produced in these areas is instrumental to the fight against the disease and will have enormous impact on the world.
Working in collaboration with the Institute of Science and Development and the National Science Library, both affiliated with CAS, bibliometric experts from Clarivate utilized the Essential Science Indicators (ESI)™ database which is built on the foundation of the Web of Science™ index to conduct co-citation analysis. The 2021 report starts with 12,147 Research Fronts in ESI from 2015 to 2020 and aims to discover which Research Fronts were most active or developing most rapidly. Analysts at CAS analyzed the 171 Research Fronts in great depth and interpreted them to highlight 31 key Research Fronts and two key Research Fronts groups.
In conjunction with the Research Fronts 2021 report, Clarivate and CAS also published “2021 Research Fronts: Active Fields, Leading Countries”, which examines and compares national performance across the 171 Research Fronts. It reveals that the US remains the leading nation for research in 11 areas of sciences and social sciences, followed by China. The gap between the US and China has been reduced. Other top 10 countries in terms of performance in these Research Fronts are UK, Germany, Italy, France, Australia, Canada, Spain and the Netherlands.
Click here to read the original press release.
