TrenDTF - Preparation and Analysis of German Research Reports on the Indicators of Research Currentity and Trends

As part of the project "Preparation and Analysis of German Research Reports on the Indicators of Research Currentity and Trends" (TrenDTF), the corpus of the German Research Reports (DTF) available at the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB) is being improved by text mining methods (in particular Topic Modeling) in order to make this corpus a data basis for new and improved indicators to support the impact evaluation of research and development activities. In addition, complementary documents such as funding announcements will be added to this corpus in order to enable a comparative analysis of the intentions of the funding agencies and the resulting research. By querying various funding bodies (BMBF, BMWi, DFG etc.), such documents are archived and made accessible in a database.

On this basis, the topicality of research reports in the cycle of the emergence of new topics in research literature, funding policy and, if applicable, the popularity of the topics to be observed will be monitored by correlation of topic-related and bibliometric data from DTF, funding lines and Wikipedia on the basis of article creation and number of calls in Wikipedia. First of all, it is examined to what extent new tools for the detection of thematic trends can be developed on the basis of the research reports. On this basis, possible indicators for measuring the topicality of research reports and their thematic proximity to funding policy will be derived. The development of these indicators takes place against the background of mission-oriented research and innovation policy and aims in particular at directionality and the degree of target achievement as factors that are difficult to measure and assess.