Unveiling Research Hotspots in Geosciences: Insights from the Data-Driven DDE Scholar Report

This paper provides an overview of the DDE Scholar Report, which investigates global research topics in the geosciences through the utilization of  bibliometrics, altmerics and global voting research methods.Background: Geoscientists need to keep up to date with the latest developments to identify research subjects, gain insights into the fields, and facilitate academic communication. The DDE Report uses big data approaches to bring about a paradigm shift in deep-time Earth research and provide a comprehensive view of solid Earth disciplines.Objective: The objective of the DDE Scholar Report is to identify and define current research hot topics in the field of solid Earth sciences. It aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the most recent advancements, trending subjects, and prospective research paths in the field of geosciences.Data: The data for the report is collected from various sources, including over 400,000 papers from 466 Geoscience journals and approximately 5,800 papers from 93 interdisciplinary journals. These datasets encompass a broad spectrum of subfields in the geosciences and provide a comprehensive overview of research trends in the field. Methods: The DDE Scholar Report combines both expert-driven and data-driven approaches to identify research hotspots. It utilizes co-citation analysis and co-word analysis methods to reveal the connections and relationships between research topics. Co-citation analysis examines the frequency with which papers are cited by the publication, while co-word analysis explores the co-occurrence patterns of words to gain insights into the relationships between concepts.Results: The final version of DDE Scholar Report presents 30 hot topics in the geosciences, with ten key works identified for each topic. This version improves upon previous iterations by achieving a moderate level of granularity and successfully integrating expert domain knowledge, literature information, and co-citation/co-occurrence methods. The hotspots cover research topics in deep space, deep time, deep earth, habitable earth, and big data domains.In conclusion, the DDE Scholar Report provides a comprehensive view of research hot topics in the geosciences. By combining expert-driven and data-driven approaches, the report offers valuable insights into the latest developments and future research directions in the field. The identified hot topics contribute to advancing knowledge and fostering academic communication in the geosciences.