Topical establishment leveraging literature evolution

From an evolutionary perspective, a body of research is an evolving ecosystem, consisting of research topics subjected to a form of natural selection as topics come into existence, and thrive more or less over a variable period of time. Identifying the form of establishment of a given topic in a scientific domain, in terms of its momentum at the time of inquiry, can provide useful insights into where this topic is heading, and can facilitate e?ective literature research. Here we propose to identify three forms of establishment of topics, emerging from a comparison between two di?erent methodologies in ranking papers, taking advantage of the mutual relationship between recognition of papers and recognition of topics. More specifically, by analysing the correlation between the rankings obtained by applying both methodologies, we discover thee clusters of topics, each of which is associated with a particular momentum of establishment.