On discovering most frequent research trends in a scientific discipline using a text mining technique

Science encompasses many sub-domains such as Computer Science, Physics, Medicine, etc. Each domain such as Computer Science can have many sub-disciplines like Networking, Data Mining, Parallel Processing, etc. Many different techniques have been used in these disciplines to solve open problems and improve existing solutions. Innovations in techniques call for researching prevalent solutions and active work being done in that field. It is thus highly desirable, yet a challenging task to automate the process of identifying current trend of research in any sub-discipline. Automation techniques will allow for faster exploration of methodology and ideas, especially among young researchers or the ones switching to related disciplines, enabling further improvisation and invention. This paper presents a technique for mining the titles and abstracts of research papers to aid in achieving this task. The key idea behind this is that the title and abstract of a research paper encompass within their component words, the core technique, methodology, or aim of that paper. We thus present preliminary ideas of a text mining technique that can efficiently identify trending research topics in a discipline. Our initial experiments exhibit encouraging results.