Detecting emerging research fronts in regenerative medicine by the citation network analysis of scientific publications

In this paper, we detect emerging research fronts in a huge number of academic papers related to regenerative medicine, a field of radically innovative research. We divide citation networks into clusters using the topological clustering method, track the positions of papers in each cluster, and visualize citation networks with characteristic terms for each cluster. Analyzing the clustering results with the average published year and parent–child relationship of each cluster could be helpful in detecting recent trends. In addition, tracking topological measures, within-cluster degree z and participation coefficient P, enables us to determine whether there are emerging knowledge clusters. Our results show the success of our method in detecting emerging research fronts in regenerative medicine, and these results are confirmed as reasonable by experts. Finally, we predict the future core papers, with the potential of many citations, via the betweenness centralities in the citation network of the research into adult and somatic stem cells.