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)
