Quantitative Topic Analysis of Materials Science Literature Using Natural Language Processing

Materials science research has garnered extensive attention from industry, society, policy, and academia. However, understanding the research landscape and extracting strategic insights are challenging due to the increasing diversity and volume of publications. This study proposes a natural language processing-based protocol for extracting text-encoded topics from a large volume of scientific literature, uncovering research interests of scientific communities, as well as convergence trends. We report a topic map, representing the materials science research landscape with text-mined 257 topics regarding biocompatible materials, structural materials, electrochemistry, or photonics. We analyze the topic map in terms of national research interests in materials science, revealing competitive positions and strategies of active nations. For example, it is found that the increasing trend of research interest in machine learning topic was captured in the United States earlier than other nations. Similarly, our journal-level analyses serve as reference information for journal recommendations and trend guidance, showing that the main topics and research interests of materials science journals slightly changed over time. Moreover, we build the topic association network which can highlight the status and future potential of interdisciplinary research, revealing research fields with high centrality in the network such as machine learning-enabled composite modeling, energy policy, or wearable electronics. This study offers insightful results on current and near-future materials science research landscapes, facilitating the understanding of stakeholders, amidst the fast-evolving and diverse knowledge of materials science.