Mapping the Academic Landscape of the Renewable Energy Field in Electrical and Electronic Disciplines

Abstract

Research on renewable energy fields of electrical and electronic disciplines is key to promoting the efficient production and utilization of renewable energy, but its branches are numerous and development is uneven. This article examines the topic distribution and future development trajectory of this field, and aims to provide academic researchers with the clearest development context and organizational structure in this field. This study obtained all fields from 3743 articles in the field of renewable energy from the Web of Science (WoS) database, with a time span of 1992–2018. We applied statistical analysis, the latent dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic model, and the autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model to map topic landscapes in the field of renewable energy. By analyzing these fields, we discovered the digital characteristics of the field and divided the field into 29 different topics, such as “Power conversion technology”, “Micro-grid”, and “Electric vehicles and hybrid electric vehicles”, and analyzed the growth characteristics of topics in two time periods—1992–2005 and 2005–2018. Finally, based on the development trajectory of each topic, we predicted their future development enthusiasm, which was divided into cold, hot, and stable. We compiled statistics on the most popular outlets and citations for each topic, making it easy for researchers and journal editors to appreciate and apply them.