Methods for bibliometric analysis of research : renewable energy case study

Abstract

This paper presents methods and software implementation for analyzing a field of research through the use of bibliometrics, i.e., information about published journal articles. Online publication search engines are queried, and their search results are extracted and analyzed, to help inform a researcher of the state of his or her field. Our methodology consists of three components: extraction of terms relevant to the research field, analysis of the growth in prevalence of these terms over time, and identification of interrelationships among these terms using a technique known as Latent Semantic Analysis. These methods are applicable to the analysis of any research field, but this paper presents results from a case study on the field of renewable energy.