A century lookback of the physics of drops: A bibliometric and text mining review

Abstract

Droplets are all around us and have been a subject of study since Leonardo Da Vinci made some drawings in the Leicester Codex. Over the years, scientists such as Lord Rayleigh and Worthington have laid the foundations of the fluid dynamics of drops. The central idea of instabilities on a jet or elongated liquid filament leading to breakup of drops depending on surface tension led to numerous discoveries. Today, the study of drop dynamics resides at the frontiers of research and technology, owing to the diverse range of phenomena involved and new experimental and numerical techniques to study them, making it a hot topic in fluid dynamics. Bibliometrics and text mining offer profound insights into specific topics, and computational tools have provided novel visualization tools to assist science, technology, and innovation management. We performed a query in the WoS database and found more than 12,000 papers dealing with the physics of droplets throughout a century. This study uses bibliometrics and text mining techniques to analyze the abstract of a paper dealing with the physics of drops, using four methods to analyse the evolution of the topic. We present information on the more frequent authors, journals, categories, institutions, and countries in drops’ research, allowing us to view where the research has been done and how it has moved over time. Our study shows that the most simple natural language processing can help understand the evolution and importance of specific research topics.