Something like Google Trends for scientific papers?

Question

Google Trends allows you to see how the interest in search keywords is building up. Something like this would be very useful for scientific papers. For example, a young researcher could look at the latest scientific trends to select hot topics of research.

The sad thing is that Google Trends does not work for scientific content. Just try searching your favourite topic there, it won't hit any results if it is slightly sophisticated.

Is there a tool like Google Trends, that crawls scientific papers to detect hot trends?

It could be a web app, or a desktop app, I don't mind. Although if desktop, ideally it should run on Linux. Obviously the app will need to have online access.

Answer 1

I am interested in this topic myself.

You can get a long way by searching other literature databases, and by using the Stackexchange data explorer.

Recently I have counted the frequency of publications, or how often users searched for this term over the years.

If you are in IT or computer science, you can use the Stackexchange data explorer. It has visualization built in.

Or -if you work in medicine- use Literature databases like PubMed for this.

IT / CompSci

For Semantic Web, SPARQL, RDF and related terms it looks like this.

Medicine / Virology

Although I don't work in Health, for some terms I have created this myself, with predictions.

Genome analysis methods

Microarray analysis (mic) is a 'cooling' research topic, whereas "Next generation sequencing" (ngs) is a 'hot' topic.

Coronavirus

Search number of puplications with title-keywords.

"Influenza", "COVID-19" pandemic, the "MERS" outbreak from 2013 and the 2003 SARS outbreak:

The before 2020 COVID-19 was unknown, but in 2020, 60000 papers have been published. Extremely hot trend. Off the scale! Sadly, predicting is impossible here.

Environment

Not papers. Books

The "Google Books Ngram Viewer" is also great for looking into past trends of the last centuries.

See this for trends of the 1980s, from the environmental realm:

Becquerel, lead-free, acid-rain-damage, nuclear fuel processing plant (in German, sorry)

Answer 2

Google Scholar has a search feature to search scientific papers for certain terms. I use Google Scholar to email me titles of papers on certain subjects. You can use it to get counts as well. Just google 'Google Scholar search' to learn all about it.