Citation network analysis of plastic electronics: Tracing the evolution and emerging research fronts

Abstract

This paper aims at tracing the evolution and finding the emerging research fronts of organic electronics. The discovery of electrically conductive polymers has opened a pathway to a new dimension in technological evolution, which replaces the rigid electronics to organic electronics. Its tremendous potential of flexibility, strength and minimal weight inspired many physicists, chemists, material scientists, electrical and electronics engineers to focus their research in this area. Traces over the past forty years made by this field inspire futurists to investigate and forecast the trajectory of organic electronics technology. Hence, by tracing the evolution and identifying the emerging research fronts, this paper will be helpful for researchers and manufacturers to directly concentrate on the upcoming research areas of organic electronics. The evolving phase of the growth curve fitted to the number of research articles related to “plastic or organic electronics” published per year shows that the research activities are still in the ascendant phase and have not reached the maturity level. This ensures that organic electronics is a promising area of research. Further, we systematically analyse the corpus of research articles related to organic electronics to trace the trajectory of the global evolution and emerging research fronts as well as the prospects of organic electronics using tools of social network analysis. We visualize the main path of evolution in the citation network and investigate the patterns to trace the knowledge diffusion path, major milestones and the emerging research fronts. Thus, we obtain the origin of third-generation solar cells and found that the emerging research articles are from articles of organic solar cells. The cluster analysis of the citation network identifies the major topics of the emerging research domains of organic solar cells.