Clarivate Plc, a global leader in connecting people and organizations to intelligence they can trust to transform their world, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) have released Research Fronts 2023, their tenth annual joint report. The report unveiled the latest progress and the evolving direction of scientific fields by identifying significant research specialties in sciences and social sciences.
A total of 128 Research Fronts were identified in this year’s report, including 110 “hot” and 18 “emerging” Fronts. A hot Research Front tracks an active area, and an emerging Research Front identifies a rapidly developing area in scientific research. The report provides a distinctive advantage for administrators, policymakers, and others who need to monitor, support, and advance the conduct of research in the face of finite resources.
The 128 Research Fronts identified this year reflect a broad range of specialty areas and topics. For example, in environmental sciences, one of the Research Fronts centers on the growing problem of microplastics in the environment – specifically, in agricultural soil, due to farmers’ use of plastic mulch. More generally, artificial intelligence (AI) continues to influence many disciplines, from promoting ‘brain-inspired learning’ in machines to affording deeper knowledge of the human proteome.
Research Fronts are defined when scientists undertake the fundamental scholarly act of citing one another’s work, reflecting a specific commonality in their research – sometimes experimental data, or a method, a concept or hypothesis. Expert analysts at Clarivate used the Essential Science Indicators (ESI)™ database which is built on the foundation of the Web of Science™ index, to conduct co-citation analysis. Research Fronts are discovered by tracking the world’s most significant scientific and scholarly literature and the patterns and groupings of how papers are cited – in particular, clusters of papers that are frequently cited together over a five-year period. A Research Front is then formed when such a group of highly cited papers attains a certain level of activity and coherence.
In conjunction with the Research Fronts 2023 report, Clarivate and CAS also published 2023 Research Fronts: Active Fields, Leading Countries/Regions to examine and compare regional performance across the 128 Research Fronts. The report revealed that the US remains the leading nation for research in 11 areas of sciences and social sciences, with China as number two. The gap between China and the US, however, has been reduced. UK, Germany and France joined the top five countries in terms of performance in Research Fronts 2023.
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