{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,28]],"date-time":"2026-02-28T09:27:34Z","timestamp":1772270854613,"version":"3.50.1"},"reference-count":50,"publisher":"PeerJ","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2017,6,19]],"date-time":"2017-06-19T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1497830400000},"content-version":"unspecified","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/2.zoppoz.workers.dev:443\/http\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"name":"Springer"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":[],"abstract":"<jats:p>\n                    The ability to promptly recognise new research trends is strategic for many stakeholders, 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\n                    <jats:italic>embryonic stage<\/jats:italic>\n                    , 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 \u2018parents\u2019 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.\n                  <\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.7717\/peerj-cs.119","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2017,6,19]],"date-time":"2017-06-19T03:25:20Z","timestamp":1497842720000},"page":"e119","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":29,"title":["How are topics born? Understanding the research dynamics preceding the emergence of new areas"],"prefix":"10.7717","volume":"3","author":[{"given":"Angelo A.","family":"Salatino","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Francesco","family":"Osborne","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Enrico","family":"Motta","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"4443","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2017,6,19]]},"reference":[{"key":"10.7717\/peerj-cs.119\/ref-1","volume-title":"Academic tribes and territories: intellectual enquiry and the culture of disciplines","author":"Becher","year":"2001"},{"key":"10.7717\/peerj-cs.119\/ref-2","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"28","DOI":"10.1038\/scientificamerican0501-34","article-title":"The semantic web","volume":"284","author":"Berners-Lee","year":"2001","journal-title":"Scientific American"},{"key":"10.7717\/peerj-cs.119\/ref-3","first-page":"147","article-title":"Correlated topic models","volume-title":"Advances in neural information processing systems","volume":"vol. 18","author":"Blei","year":"2006"},{"key":"10.7717\/peerj-cs.119\/ref-4","first-page":"993","article-title":"Latent dirichlet allocation","volume":"3","author":"Blei","year":"2003","journal-title":"Journal of Machine Learning Research"},{"key":"10.7717\/peerj-cs.119\/ref-5","first-page":"776","article-title":"Topic and trend detection in text collections using latent dirichlet allocation","author":"Bolelli","year":"2009"},{"key":"10.7717\/peerj-cs.119\/ref-6","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"351","DOI":"10.1007\/s11192-005-0255-6","article-title":"Mapping the backbone of science","volume":"64","author":"Boyack","year":"2005","journal-title":"Scientometrics"},{"key":"10.7717\/peerj-cs.119\/ref-7","first-page":"51","article-title":"Ontology forecasting in scientific literature: semantic concepts prediction based on innovation-adoption priors","author":"Cano Basave","year":"2016"},{"key":"10.7717\/peerj-cs.119\/ref-8","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","DOI":"10.1145\/1814245.1814249","article-title":"Emerging topic detection on twitter based on temporal and social terms evaluation","author":"Cataldi","year":"2010"},{"issue":"1","key":"10.7717\/peerj-cs.119\/ref-9","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"124","DOI":"10.1214\/09-AOAS309","article-title":"Hierarchical relational models for document networks","volume":"4","author":"Chang","year":"2010","journal-title":"The Annals of Applied Statistics"},{"key":"10.7717\/peerj-cs.119\/ref-10","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"e54847","DOI":"10.1371\/journal.pone.0054847","article-title":"Phylomemetic patterns in science evolution\u2014the rise and fall of scientific fields","volume":"8","author":"Chavalarias","year":"2013","journal-title":"PLOS ONE"},{"key":"10.7717\/peerj-cs.119\/ref-11","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","DOI":"10.4135\/9781446217023","volume-title":"The philosophy of science: science and objectivity","author":"Couvalis","year":"1997"},{"key":"10.7717\/peerj-cs.119\/ref-12","volume-title":"The structure of positive interpersonal relations in small groups","author":"Davis","year":"1967"},{"key":"10.7717\/peerj-cs.119\/ref-13","volume-title":"Detection of bursty and emerging trends towards identification of researchers at the early stage of trends","author":"Decker","year":"2007"},{"key":"10.7717\/peerj-cs.119\/ref-14","first-page":"265","article-title":"Undercovering research trends: network analysis of keywords in scholarly articles","volume":"vol. 26","author":"Duvvuru","year":"2012"},{"key":"10.7717\/peerj-cs.119\/ref-15","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"439","DOI":"10.1016\/j.procs.2013.09.300","article-title":"Analyzing structural & temporal characteristics of keyword system in academic research articles","volume":"20","author":"Duvvuru","year":"2013","journal-title":"Procedia Computer Science"},{"key":"10.7717\/peerj-cs.119\/ref-16","first-page":"45","article-title":"Exploring the computing literature using temporal graph visualization","volume":"2004","author":"Erten","year":"2004","journal-title":"Electronic Imaging"},{"key":"10.7717\/peerj-cs.119\/ref-17","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"221","DOI":"10.1016\/j.socnet.2010.03.004","article-title":"A puzzle concerning triads in social networks: graph constraints and the triad census","volume":"32","author":"Faust","year":"2010","journal-title":"Social Networks"},{"issue":"9","key":"10.7717\/peerj-cs.119\/ref-18","first-page":"1408","article-title":"Are we there yet? 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