2024 Research Fronts: Insights into Top and Emerging Scientific Trends
Discover the latest findings from the eleventh annual Research Fronts™ report by Clarivate™ and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, highlighting the hot and emerging fields in science for 2024.
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 science, including data on the countries and institutions producing the work.
The latest annual edition, 2024 Research Fronts, marks the eleventh collaboration between Clarivate and CAS.
This report 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 judgments of human indexers or analysts. Instead, researchers reveal these Fronts when they decide upon the most relevant and significant papers to cite in their work.
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 Institute of Science and Development, and the National Science Library of CAS, collaborated with bibliometric experts from Clarivate, turning to the Essential Science Indicators™ database, which is built on the foundation of the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE)™ and Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI)™.
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 2018 and 2023, 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 15 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 broad range of topics addressing societal challenges
As with past years, the latest Research Fronts reflect a broad range of specialty areas and topics.
Continuing a theme from last year’s report, on microplastic pollution, this year’s analysis reveals a concentration of research on another aspect of the problem: particles created by the constant wear and degradation of car and truck tires due to friction with road surfaces. The resulting ’tire wear particles,’ spread by the runoff of rainwater into streams and rivers, are a major component of plastic pollution and a serious threat to human and animal health.
Other specialty fields include research that seeks to reverse the effects of pollution and climate change. For example, a Research Front in ecology and environmental science discusses technology that uses adsorption to capture and remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Another front, within chemistry and materials science, describes refinements in generating water from atmospheric vapor—an obvious boon to regions that perennially suffer from water scarcity.
From biomedicine, meanwhile, a distinct pocket of research has advanced the development of drugs based on monoclonal antibodies for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. Another highlighted area involves refining the ’epigenetic clock,’ a tool that measures DNA methylation levels to precisely determine the age of a human body to predict age-related morbidity and mortality, among other factors.
In astronomy and astrophysics, a concentration of researchers is striving for an exact measurement of the Hubble constant, the rate at which the universe is expanding. By contrast, dealing in entirely Earth-bound matters, social scientists are examining the ramifications of ultra-processed foods, as well as the complexities and consequences of today’s prevalent ‘gig economy.’
Last, continuing a strain from last year, the field of artificial intelligence (AI) continues to command attention, in such aspects as next-generation AI technology as well as the ethical and legal complexities confronting society as AI advances and increasingly permeates society.
Of course, these examples represent only a small sampling of the 110 specialty areas highlighted in the report.
A deeper look at how nations and institutions perform
Released concurrently with 2024 Research Fronts is the updated version of another yearly report: 2024 Research Fronts: Active Fields, Leading Countries/Regions. This report provides a deeper view of Research Front activity, including extensive and nuanced metrics on national and institutional performance in the 2024 Research Fronts.
Read the full 2024 Research Fronts reports.
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