Clarivate Analytics plc, a global leader in providing trusted insights and analytics to accelerate the pace of innovation, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences has released their joint report ‘Research Fronts 2019’ to identify the hottest and emerging specialty areas in scientific research from 2013 to 2018. This is the sixth annual collaborative report between the two organisations and was launched at a joint forum held at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.
The 2019 report identifies a total of 137 Research Fronts, including 100 hot and 37 emerging specialties spanning 10 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. The ability to identify these Research Fronts and to track emerging specialty areas of research provides a distinct advantage for governments, policy makers, publishers, research administrators and others who monitor, support and advance the conduct of research, often in the face of finite resources.
Working in collaboration with both the Institute of Science and Development, and the National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, bibliometric experts from the Web of Science Group, a Clarivate Analytics company, utilised the Essential Science Indicators (ESI) database which is built on the foundation of the Web of Science index to do co-citation analysis. The 2019 report starts from 10,587 Research Fronts in ESI from 2013 to 2018 and aims to discover which Research Fronts were most active or developing most rapidly. Analysts at the Chinese Academy of Sciences also analysed the 137 Research Fronts provided by the Web of Science Group in great depth and interpreted them to highlight 30 key Research Fronts of particular interest.
Research Fronts identified in this year’s report reflect the recent award-winning research highlighted by the Nobel committee in 2019. The ‘hot Research Front’ in astronomy and astrophysics from 2016 to 2018 – Exoplanets detection and characterisation with Kepler, which is related to the award-winning research by this year’s Nobel Laureates in Physics. Another example is the key hot Research Front in mathematics, computer sciences and engineering this year – State of charge estimation of lithium-ion batteries used in electric vehicles, which reflects the recognition for the development of lithium-ion batteries by the Nobel prize committee for Chemistry 2019.
In conjunction with the Research Fronts 2019 report, the two organisations also published an analytical report entitled "2019 Research Fronts: Active Fields, Leading Countries" which examines and compares national performance across the 137 Research Fronts, thereby reflecting a country's contribution and citation impact (global influence) across the 10 broad research areas. This report reveals that based on the Research Leadership Index of 137 Research Fronts, the US is still leading global research followed by China in second place. UK, Germany and France rank the third, fourth and fifth, and China is reducing its gap with the US.
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