The use of citation context to detect the evolution of research topics: a large-scale analysis

Abstract

With the exponential increase in the number of published papers, discovering how topics evolve becomes increasingly important for anybody involved in research, including researchers, institutes, research funding bodies, and decision-makers. This study proposes a large-scale analysis of the evolution of biomedical and life sciences using the citation contexts of the collected papers, or more precisely their citing sentences. Using 64,350 papers published in PubMed Central between 2008 and 2018, we determined the research trends for ten research topics. Moreover, we studied how these topics evolve across countries and across the most common journals in biomedical and life sciences.