Worldwide Trends in Brain Research: A Bibliom Analysis

Brain research has advanced our understanding of the biological substrates of human behavior and its perturbation across a variety of neurophysiological states and disorders. Over the last 80 years, Brain Research has gained a lot of traction, culminating in the 1990s which was named “The Decade of the Brain” to enhance the visibility of brain research. Bibliometrics methods have allowed researchers to assess the popularity of brain research through the ever-growing number of brain-related research papers in various bibliographic databases. While many topics of brain research have been covered by previous studies, there is no comprehensive overview of the evolution of brain research and its various specialties and funding practices over a long period of time. Using new techniques from Natural Language Processing, research topics can be inferred from abstract and titles of Brain Research papers, which can be used to infer new scientific trends. This project aims to determine (1) how brain research has evolved over time in terms of papers, (2) country rankings in terms of papers and impact, (3) how research topics vary by country and year.

Faculty Supervisor:

Vincent Larivière

Student:

Partner:

Fondation Brain Canada

Discipline:

Life Sciences

Sector:

Other services (except public administration)

University:

Université de Montréal

Program: