A “Milky Way Research Trend” System for Survey of Scientific Literature

Research trend survey is an essential preliminary step for any academic researches, but many beginning researchers have difficulty because they are still foreign to appropriate keywords in his/her research field. We constructed a support system for research trend surveys not only to accelerate the preliminary step but also to let students have a better grips of trend progresses and keyword transitions. Our system assumes a fair amount of data accumulation, for which we employed KAKEN database excerpts, but does not assume manual keyword registration or any other heuristic preprocesses: with an associative search module, it dynamically searches relevant words that are frequently used in the targeted academic field and gives users effective visualizations to understand trend transitions. Preliminary evaluations suggest that the trend transitions that our system presents are effective for trend surveys.