Exploration Of Identifying Emerging Research Areas Based On The View Of Multiple Science Indicators

Since the acceleration of science brought significant influence to human society, the identification of emerging research trends is of key interest to diverse stakeholders, not only to scientists. Especially, the emerging research areas have become the competition focus of science, technology and economy of each countries worldwide. Hence, the identification of emerging research areas means much to the innovation capacity and science policy of one country, and helping scientists to recognize the newly research direction as well.Based on four basic theories which are scientific fronts theory of Price, scientific development pattern of Kuhn, scientific growth and change research of Menard, and identification and visualization of scientific fronts of Chen, this study constructed the theoretical framework of identifying emerging research areas which is based on the summary the characteristics and the forming process and development of emerging research area from the level of research subject and object. These four basic theories are from different angles scientometrics. macro-theory, micro-quantification and visualization of scientific growth. According to this proposed theoretical conceptualization, this study designed seven science indicators to identify emerging research areas systematically, which is from the loops of individual, research topic, paper and peer review. They are "number of new author""co-occurrence of bursting topic words","bursting key references’","citation age""interdisciplinary","number of awards" and "amount of awards"This study adopted four datasets of "Quantum Computation","RNA interference""Semantic Web" and "h index and h-type indices" research areas. The former two are from natural science and the latter two are from social science. Simultaneously, for the reliability of the conclusion, the dataset of "Cold Fusion" research area was also introduced here as a declined area which provided a comparative analysis. The results indicate that these seven science indicators can indentify emerging research areas from the five loops effectively. It should be noted that "co-occurrence of bursting topic words" can detect and identify the forming and shift of core concepts in emerging research areas precisely and play a basic role in this loop. The indicators of "number of bursting key references" and "citation age" can be viewed as indicating the mature of emerging research areas. The indicators of "number of new authors","interdisciplinarity"."number of awards" and "amount of awards" play the supportive roles in indicating the emerging, interdisciplinary and continous vitality of new research areas.The temporal structure mode of multiple science indicators in the forming process of emerging research areas was proposed in this study. A certain research area is always driven up by scientists, especially those young scientists and they bring in fresh and diverse scientific idea which form the core concepts in later period. Furthermore, these core concepts are manifested by research literatures and some of them impact the areas quite a lot. which become the key references. This certain research area attracts many scientists from diverse background which proceed more relevant studies and shows very high interdisciplinarity. Afterwards, more scientists tend to apply their research into practice or gain more awards to demonstrate deep going studies which shows the highly agreement of peer reviews.