AN ADVANCED DIFFUSION MODEL TO IDENTIFY EMERGENT RESEARCH ISSUES: THE CASE OF OPTOELECTRONIC DEVICES

Scientific progress in technology oriented research fields is made by incremental or fundamental inventions concerning natural science effects, materials, methods, tools and applications. Therefore our approach focuses on research activities of such technological elements on the basis of keywords in published articles. In this paper we show how emerging topics in the field of optoelectronic devices based on scientific literature data from the PASCAL-database can be identified. We use Results from PROMTECH project, whose principal objective was to produce a methodology allowing the identification of promising emerging technologies. In this project, the study of the intersection of Applied Sciences as well as Life (Biological & Medical) Sciences domains and Physics with bibliometric methods produced 45 candidate technological fields and the validation by expert panels led to a final selection of 10 most promising ones. These 45 technologies were used as reference fields. In order to detect the emerging research, we combine two methodological approaches. The first one introduces a new modelling of field terminology evolution based on bibliometric indicators: the diffusion model and the second one is a diachronic cluster analysis. With the diffusion model we identified single keywords that represent a high dynamic of the mentioned technology elements. The cluster analysis was used to recombine articles, where the identified keywords were used to technological topics in the field of optoelectronic devices. This methodology allows us to answer the following questions: Which technological aspects within our considered field can be detected? Which of them are already established and which of them are new? How are the topics linked to each other?