Twelfth Annual “Research Fronts Report” Highlights Hot and Emerging Fields

To highlight fast-moving and emerging specialty areas of science, Clarivate has once again partnered with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in a yearly report on the hottest fields in research, including data on the countries and institutions producing the work. The latest annual edition, Research Fronts 2025, marks the twelfth collaboration between Clarivate and the CAS. The new report was released on December 3.

This new report, like its predecessors, bases its findings on Research Fronts, which are self-organizing clusters of related research identified by citation analysis. Research Fronts form when clusters of Highly Cited Papers are frequently cited together. This pattern, known as “co-citation,” indicates that the papers share a cognitive link or point of commonality, such as a concept, hypothesis, method, or experimental data. With the co-cited papers serving as a foundational “core,” the other component of a Research Front consists of the subsequent papers that cite the core. These citing papers offer insights into how a given specialty area is progressing and evolving.

An “organic” view of research

A unique advantage of Research Fronts is that identifying these “nodes” of specialized activity does not depend on the judgements of human indexers or analysts. Instead, researchers themselves reveal these fronts in the course of publishing their work, when they decide upon the most pertinent and significant papers to cite. In this way, Research Fronts provide a more dynamic and “organic” perspective on how specialty areas form, grow, branch out, merge with other disciplines, and, possibly, dissipate, as new citation-based groupings reveal themselves.

This dynamic view of the research landscape is invaluable in providing knowledge and foresight to policymakers and administrators in governmental, academic, and commercial settings—as well as to anyone with an interest in the latest areas of concentration and activity in science.

As in past reports, analysts from the Institute of Strategic Information within the Institutes of Science and Development, and the National Science Library of the CAS, collaborated with bibliometric experts from Clarivate, turning to the Essential Science Indicators database, which is built on the foundation of the Web of Science Core Collection index.

Analysts first consolidated the 22 subject fields in Essential Science Indicators into 11 broad specialty areas. Starting with more than 12,000 Research Fronts, representing papers published and cited between 2019 and 2024, the next step was to select the fronts containing core literature that is both highly cited and recent—an indicator of particularly active and fast-moving research.

Ultimately, the analysis produced 110 fronts that are especially active, or “hot,” as well as 18 emerging fronts, with the latter selected based on notably recent core literature.

In addition to listing all 110 Research Fronts across the 11 specialty areas, the report’s discipline-based chapters include detailed examinations of selected fronts, including rankings of notable nations and institutions whose contributions are central to each front’s core and citing literature.

A range of research

As with past years, the latest compendium of fast-moving Research Fronts reflects a broad range of specialty areas and topics.

In Clinical Medicine, one active front reflects advances in the treatment of cystic fibrosis (CF), a genetic disease that, in previous decades, usually took the lives of patients in their teens or early twenties. With the advent of “precision” therapies aimed at the genetic defect underlying the disease—rather than merely addressing symptoms—CF treatment has been transformed, with dramatic improvements in quality of life and survival rates.

Meanwhile, among other active Research Fronts in biomedicine, one concentrates on the quest to fully analyze, as well as modernize, the medicinal compounds that have long been a part of Traditional Chinese Medicine.

By now, the global problem of plastic pollution has become depressingly familiar, not to mention costly, reportedly accounting for more than $1 trillion in health-related and remediation costs each year. Current research is confronting this problem, and the topic has been an evolving theme in these annual Research Front reports.

In Chemistry and Materials Science, a fast-moving cluster of research explores improvements in in the recycling of olefin plastics. In contrast to older “mechanical” means of recycling (i.e., crushing and melting), recent research has concentrated on the process of “chemical” recycling of polyolefin plastics. Ultimately, this process produces recycled plastic compounds with higher quality and more potential applications, such as food packaging.

Meanwhile, a busy area in Astronomy and Astrophysics concerns the ongoing quest to learn the fundamental nature of dark matter, which is theorized to compose 27% of the universe’s total mass-energy content, but whose precise makeup is still a mystery. Elsewhere among the Research Fronts, in the realm of the social sciences, active subfields included the study of robotics and its effect on human employment, the development of personalized psychotherapy, and assessing the applications and risk management associated with the ever-growing use of artificial intelligence (AI) in business.

The multidisciplinary presence of AI increased in this year’s Research Front roundup, with six of the 11 broad specialty areas containing subfields whose titles mention the term. This reflects the technology’s growing visibility in society, as the technical, ethical, and legal issues continue to inspire research and provoke debate.

These examples, of course, represent only a small sampling of the 128 specialty areas highlighted in the report.

Download the English reports of Research Fronts 2025 and Research Fronts 2025: Active Fields, Leading Countries here.

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