Tracking emerging technologies in energy research: Toward a roadmap for sustainable energy

Science and technology for renewable and sustainable energy are indispensable for our future society and economics. To meet the goal of sustainable energy development, there is a growing body of research efforts world wide. The planner of energy research has to grasp the broader coverage of scientific and technological research, and make decisions on effective investment in promising and emerging technologies especially under circumstances of limited resources. In this paper, we track emerging research domains in energy research by using citation network analysis. Our analysis confirms that the fuel cell and solar cell are rapidly growing domains in energy research. We further investigate the detailed structure of these two domains by clustering publications in these domains. Each citation cluster has characteristic research topics, and there is a variety of growth trends among the clusters. By using citation network analysis, we can track emerging research domains among a pile of publications efficiently and effectively. © 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.