Clarivate Analytics, the global leader in providing trusted insights and analytics to enable researchers to accelerate discovery, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences have released 'Research Fronts 2018', their joint annual report identifying 138 prominent subspecialties of scientific research from 2012 until 2017. A Research Front is a cluster of highly cited papers over a five year period, referred to as 'core papers' in a specialised topic, defined by co-citation and cluster analysis.
Early detection of clusters of scientific papers is a significant challenge for scholars at universities and research institutes, as well as policy makers in business and government. Understanding the latest developments in a given field provides insights into future trends - this could help researchers looking for new areas of research, assist with policy decisions on funding and patent applications or to make informed decisions on planned collaborations with other research institutions. The report launched at today's joint forum held at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, is the fifth collaborative, annual report and identifies 138 key Research Fronts including 100 hot and 38 emerging specialties spanning 10 broad areas of sciences and social sciences, based on a comprehensive analysis of scientific literature citations.
Working in collaboration with both the Institutes of Science and Development and the National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Clarivate bibliometric experts utilised the Essential Science Indicators (ESI) database, a web-based research analytics platform, and a unique compilation of science performance metrics and trend data based on scholarly publication and citation data from the Web of Science platform from 2012 - 2017. It is worth mentioning that some of the key Research Fronts identified in recent years are related to Nobel Prize award-winning research.
In conjunction with the Research Fronts 2018 report, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Clarivate Analytics also published an analytical report entitled '2018 Research Fronts: Active Fields, Leading Countries' which examines and compares national performance across the 138 Research Fronts, thereby reflecting a country's contribution and citation impact (global influence) across the 10 broad areas. This report reveals that based on the Research Leadership Index of 138 Research Fronts, the USA is still leading global research on 82 Research Fronts followed by China in second place with 32 Research Fronts ahead of the UK and Germany with four and six Research Fronts respectively. China is most prolific in the field of Chemistry and Materials Science, and the field of Mathematics, Computer Science and Engineering; but is less influential in Clinical Medicine, and the field of Astronomy and Astrophysics.
The full 'Research Fronts 2018 report is available in Simplified Chinese and English.
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