(5 Jan 2023) Clarivate Plc, a global leader in providing trusted information and insights to accelerate the pace of innovation, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) have released Research Fronts 2022, their ninth annual collaborative report. The report identifies significant areas in the world of sciences and social sciences as to where the scientific community is focusing its attention, including several COVID-related fronts and areas mirrored by the research fields of Noble Prize in recent years.
In the report, ’Research Fronts’ are defined when scientists undertake the fundamental scholarly act of citing one another’s work, reflecting a specific commonality in their research – sometimes experimental data, or a method, a concept or hypothesis. Research Fronts are discovered by tracking the world’s most significant scientific and scholarly literature and the patterns and groupings of how papers are cited – in particular, clusters of papers that are frequently cited together over a five-year period. A Research Front is then formed when such a group of highly cited papers attains a certain level of activity and coherence.
This year’s report identified 165 Research Fronts, including 110 ‘hot’ and 55 ‘emerging’ fronts spanning in 11 broad areas. As with last year, more than one third of the Research Fronts identified this year are related to COVID-19, such as ‘side effects and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines against variants’. Several Research Fronts well reflected the research fields of Noble Prize recipients in the recent years, such as ‘the properties of GW190814’s secondary component with 2.6 solar mass’. Experts at CAS analyzed and interpreted all the Research Fronts to further highlight 32 key Research Fronts and one key Research Front group.
In conjunction with the Research Fronts 2022 report, Clarivate and CAS also published 2022 Research Fronts: Active Fields, Leading Countries to examine and compare national performance across the 165 Research Fronts. It reveals that the US remains the leading nation for research in 11 areas of sciences and social sciences. The gap between the US and China has been reduced. Other top 10 countries in terms of performance in these Research Fronts are UK, Germany, France, Italy, Australia, Spain, Canada, and Switzerland.
For more information about this year’s report and the highlighted Research Fronts here.
The press release in full is here.
