Detecting and Visualizing Emerging Trends and Transient Patterns in Fuel Cell Scientific Literature

We analyze thematic trends and challenging issues in fuel cell research based on the metadata of 4185 research papers indexed in Science Citation Index (SCI) database between 1990 and 2007. We specifically address 1) all-time prominent challenges in fuel cell, 2) a trend of progression in fuel cell, 3) the structure and dynamics of the fuel cell community. We utilize CiteSpace, a progressive domain visualization tool, to identify and visualize the movement of research fronts and intellectual bases, persistent clusters of papers, and the evolution of coauthorship networks as well as citation networks. The result contributed an in-depth analysis of a major forum of fuel cell and a systematic and streamlined method to keep abreast of the history and the state of the research of fuel cell.