A New Framework for Research Supply and Demand Using Text Analytics

Abstract

Numerous research studies are conducted annually, and many researchers look for them in the scientific databases. In order to manage the research ecosystem, it is necessary to have sufficient knowledge about the research supply and demand. This study proposes a novel expert-independent framework to investigate the research supply and demand among the huge number of studies. In this framework, the combination of quantitative, bibliographic, and content analysis methods is applied via text mining techniques. To evaluate the proposed framework, environmental data from the Iran scientific information database is used (Ganj) <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> as a rich database. It includes more than 513,000 supplied records and more than 78 million search queries as the research demands. To analyze the research supply and demand, the research topics are extracted via the topic modeling approach from both the supply and demand side. The results showed that the educational category of environmental studies is moved from medical science to engineering in the last decades. Moreover, the gap analysis between research supply and demand identified “Extraction” and “Tourism” as hot topics, “Education,” “Management,” and “Culture” as cold topics, “Soil” and “Energy” as silent topics and finally, “International Rights” and “River” as gap topics. The findings can support environmental policymakers and research managers in making decisions and identifying environmental research needs and priorities. The proposed framework for other research areas can be used to examine and balance research supply and demand.