Early Detection of Research Trends

Being able to rapidly recognise new research trends is strategic for many stakeholders, including universities, institutional funding bodies, academic publishers and companies. The literature presents several approaches to identifying the emergence of new research topics, which rely on the assumption that the topic is already exhibiting a certain degree of popularity and consistently referred to by a community of researchers. However, detecting the emergence of a new research area at an embryonic stage, i.e., before the topic has been consistently labelled by a community of researchers and associated with a number of publications, is still an open challenge. In this dissertation, we begin to address this challenge by performing a study of the dynamics preceding the creation of new topics. This study indicates that the emergence of a new topic is anticipated by a significant increase in the pace of collaboration between relevant research areas, which can be seen as the 'ancestors' of the new topic. Based on this understanding, we developed Augur, a novel approach to effectively detect the emergence of new research topics. Augur analyses the diachronic relationships between research areas and is able to detect clusters of topics that exhibit dynamics correlated with the emergence of new research topics. Here we also present the Advanced Clique Percolation Method (ACPM), a new community detection algorithm developed specifically for supporting this task. Augur was evaluated on a gold standard of 1,408 debutant topics in the 2000-2011 timeframe and outperformed four alternative approaches in terms of both precision and recall

Early Detection and Forecasting of Research Trends

Identifying and forecasting research trends is of critical importance for a variety of stakeholders, including researchers, academic publishers, institutional funding bodies, companies operating in the innovation space and others. Currently, this task is performed either by domain experts, with the assistance of tools for exploring research data, or by automatic approaches. The constant increase of research data makes the second solution more appropriate, howeverautomatic methods suffer from a number of limitations. For instance, they are unable to detect emerging but yet unlabelled research areas (e.g., Semantic Web before 2000). Furthermore, they usually quantify the popularity of a topic simply in terms of the number of related publications or authors for each year; hence they can provide good forecasts only on trends which have existed for at least 3-4 years. This doctoral work aims at solving these limitations by providing a novel approach for the early detection and forecasting of research trends that will take advantage of the rich variety of semantic relationships between research entities (e.g., authors, workshops, communities) and of social media data (e.g., tweets, blogs)

How are topics born? Understanding the research dynamics preceding the emergence of new areas

The ability to promptly recognise new research trends is strategic for many stake- holders, including universities, institutional funding bodies, academic publishers and companies. While the literature describes several approaches which aim to identify the emergence of new research topics early in their lifecycle, these rely on the assumption that the topic in question is already associated with a number of publications and consistently referred to by a community of researchers. Hence, detecting the emergence of a new research area at an embryonic stage, i.e., before the topic has been consistently labelled by a community of researchers and associated with a number of publications, is still an open challenge. In this paper, we begin to address this challenge by performing a study of the dynamics preceding the creation of new topics. This study indicates that the emergence of a new topic is anticipated by a significant increase in the pace of collaboration between relevant research areas, which can be seen as the ‘parents’ of the new topic. These initial findings (i) confirm our hypothesis that it is possible in principle to detect the emergence of a new topic at the embryonic stage, (ii) provide new empirical evidence supporting relevant theories in Philosophy of Science, and also (iii) suggest that new topics tend to emerge in an environment in which weakly interconnected research areas begin to cross-fertilise

Smart Topic Miner: Supporting Springer Nature Editors with Semantic Web Technologies

Academic publishers, such as Springer Nature, annotate scholarly products with the appropriate research topics and keywords to facilitate the marketing process and to support (digital) libraries and academic search engines. This critical process is usually handled manually by experienced editors, leading to high costs and slow throughput. In this demo paper, we present Smart Topic Miner (STM), a semantic application designed to support the Springer Nature Computer Science editorial team in classifying scholarly publications. STM analyses conference proceedings and annotates them with a set of topics drawn from a large automatically generated ontology of research areas and a set of tags from Springer Nature Classification

2100 AI: Reflections on the mechanisation of scientific discovery

The pace of research is nowadays extremely intensive, with datasets and publications being published at an unprecedented rate. In this context data science, artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data analytics are providing researchers with new automatic techniques which not only help them to manage this flow of information but are also able to identify automatically interesting patterns and insights in this vast sea of information. However, the emergence of mechanised scientific discovery is likely to dramatically change the way we do science, thus introducing and amplifying serious societal implications on the role of researchers themselves, which need to be analysed thoroughly

Classifying Research Papers with the Computer Science Ontology

Ontologies of research areas are important tools for characterising, exploring and analysing the research landscape. We recently released the Computer Science Ontology (CSO), a large-scale, automatically generated ontology of research areas, which includes about 26K topics and 226K semantic relationships. CSO currently powers several tools adopted by the Springer Nature editorial team and has been used to enable a variety of solutions, such as classifying research publications, detecting research communities, and predicting research trends. As an effort to encourage the usage of CSO, we have developed the CSO Portal, a web application that enables users to download, explore, and provide granular feedbacks at different levels of the ontology. In this paper, we present the CSO Classifier, an application for automatically classifying academic papers according to the rich taxonomy of topics from CSO. The aim is to facilitate the adoption of CSO across the various communities engaged with scholarly data and to foster the development of new applications based on this knowledge base

Supporting Springer Nature Editors by means of Semantic Technologies

The Open University and Springer Nature have been collaborating since 2015 in the development of an array of semantically-enhanced solutions supporting editors in i) classifying proceedings and other editorial products with respect to the relevant research areas and ii) taking informed decisions about their marketing strategy. These solutions include i) the Smart Topic API, which automatically maps keywords associated with published papers to semantically characterized topics, which are drawn from a very large and automatically-generated ontology of Computer Science topics; ii) the Smart Topic Miner, which helps editors to associate scholarly metadata to books; and iii) the Smart Book Recommender, which assists editors in deciding which editorial products should be marketed in a specific venue

Detection of Embryonic Research Topics by Analysing Semantic Topic Networks

Being aware of new research topics is an important asset for anybody involved in the research environment, including researchers, academic publishers and institutional funding bodies. In recent years, the amount of scholarly data available on the web has increased steadily, allowing the development of several approaches for detecting emerging research topics and assessing their trends. However, current methods focus on the detection of topics which are already associated with a label or a substantial number of documents. In this paper, we address instead the issue of detecting embryonic topics, which do not possess these characteristics yet. We suggest that it is possible to forecast the emergence of novel research topics even at such early stage and demonstrate that the emergence of a new topic can be anticipated by analysing the dynamics of pre-existing topics. We present an approach to evaluate such dynamics and an experiment on a sample of 3 million research papers, which confirms our hypothesis. In particular, we found that the pace of collaboration in sub-graphs of topics that will give rise to novel topics is significantly higher than the one in the control group

Smart Book Recommender: A Semantic Recommendation Engine for Editorial Products

Academic publishers, such as Springer Nature, need to constantly make informed decisions about how and where to market their editorial products. In the field of Computer Science (CS), it is particularly critical to assess which books will be of interest to the attendees of a conference. Typically, these items are manually chosen by publishing editors, on the basis of their personal experience. To make this process both faster and more robust we have developed the Smart Book Recommender (SBR), a semantic application designed to support the Springer Nature editorial team in promoting their publications at CS venues. SBR takes as input the proceedings of a conference and suggests books, journals, and other conference proceedings which are likely to be relevant to the attendees of the conference in question. It does so by taking advantage of a semantic representation of topics, which builds on a very large ontology of Computer Science topics; characterizing Springer Nature books as distributions of semantic topics; and approaching the problem as one of semantic matching between such distributions of semantic topics

Ontology Extraction and Usage in the Scholarly Knowledge Domain

Ontologies of research areas have been proven to be useful resources for analysing and making sense of scholarly data. In this chapter, we present the Computer Science Ontology (CSO), which is the largest ontology of research areas in the field, and discuss a number of applications that build on CSO to support high-level tasks, such as topic classification, metadata extraction, and recommendation of books