Worldwide Energetics Informatics
PI: Mr. Dylan Hazelwood and Mr. Robert Kaczmarek
This project is concerned with a systematic survey and analysis of worldwide energetics research literature. The group is attempting to answer the overall question of “What is the world doing in Energetics?”. A bibliometric source analysis was undertaken of available databases of technical research papers. The repository uses RIS as the output format of choice in conjunction with the Papers bibliography software on the OS X platform.
The process of gathering data began with a list of attendees of past NTREM (New Trends in Energetic Materials) conferences, focused mainly in Europe. A strong keyword list was then built following an iterative process, using terms and phrases particular to energetic materials that had appeared in paper titles, keywords and abstracts from an initial seed term collection. This list is currently comprised of 138 keywords, phrases and compounds, and includes 185 carefully crafted exclusion terms in an attempt to narrow the result set, due to the multi-disciplinary nature of the Scopus database.
The resulting keyword list was used to search each country worldwide in an effort to begin to answer the questions of who, what, where, and when of energetic materials research.
World Map Showing Concentration of Energetic Materials
Research Output, 1991-2011
Additional analysis work is planned to examine trends within the captured data, using open source bibliographic analysis tools. Citespace, software designed to assist in visualizing and analyzing trends and patterns in scientific literature, is a promising tool, and testing with other common tools has shown the ability to perform reasonably straightforward analysis with this bibliographic data. Future work planned includes the possible development of a system for automated gathering of updated technical papers, an expansion to other data sources, such as Google Scholar, for more time-sensitive data gathering, and additional data types, such as web pages, full-text papers, etc.
