China issues reports on research fronts in 2019

BEIJING -- China on Tuesday released reports on research hotspots and emerging frontier in 2019.

Titled "2019 Research Fronts" and "Research Front 2019: Active Fields, Leading Countries," the two reports were issued by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, as a collaborative achievement of the Institutes of Science and Development (CASISD), National Science Library and Clarivate Analytics.

In the reports, 137 key research fronts are identified out of 10 broad research areas, including 100 hot and 37 emerging topics.

The reports evaluate the performances of leading countries in those 137 research topics, revealing that China ranks second to the United States, followed by Britain, Germany and France.

The reports also reveal that the most active research topics of China are found in three fields of chemistry and materials science, mathematics, computer science and engineering, and ecology and environmental science. The fields of agricultural, plant and animal sciences, geosciences, biosciences, physics, and social sciences are relatively active. However, the research activities in the fields of clinical medicine, astronomy and astrophysics remain insufficient.

Since 2014, the reports on research fronts were released annually by CASISD in collaboration with Clarivate Analytics, focused on unveiling and analyzing the hotspots and emerging frontiers in the basic science fields through big data and bibliometric methods.