Tracing scientist's research trends realtimely

Abstract

In this research, we propose a method to trace scientist's research trends realtimely. By monitoring the downloads of scientific articles in the journal of Scientometrics for 744 h, namely one month, we investigate the download statistics. Then we aggregate the keywords in these downloaded research papers, and analyze the trends of article downloading and keyword downloading. Furthermore, taking both the downloads of keywords and articles into consideration, we design a method to detect the emerging research trends. We find that in scientometrics field, social media, new indices to quantify scientific productivity (g-index), webometrics, semantic, text mining, and open access are emerging fields that scientometrics researchers are focusing on. © 2012 Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary.