Unveiling Weak Signals of Emergence in Underwater Sensing Research Trends
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Detecting emerging research trends is crucial as it allows for the proactive identification and monitoring of novel and influential topics in the scientific community. Monitoring research trends aids researchers, institutions, and policymakers in allocating resources, fostering innovation, and staying competitive in rapidly changing scientific landscapes. The growing significance of underwater sensing technologies in various domains has propelled research endeavors aimed at understanding the characteristics of academic discourse in this field. In this work, we comprehensively analyzed the academic research topics related to underwater sensing technologies using advanced computational methodologies. Leveraging natural language processing, topic modeling, and weak signal detection techniques, and focusing on underwater sensing as the case technology, we dissect a large corpus of scholarly articles published between 2007 and 2021 to unveil underlying thematic patterns and emergent trends within this domain while shedding light on signals of emerging technologies. Among the eighty extracted topics, six research topics were identified and recognized as emerging weak signals and validated by experts. Notably, deep learning for underwater imaging was the only topic that transitioned from being weak to a strong signal in the final period. Received: 22 July 2024 | Revised: 9 October 2024 | Accepted: 15 October 2024 Conflicts of Interest The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest to this work. Data Availability Statement Data are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. Author Contribution Statement Ashkan Ebadi: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Data curation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Visualization, Supervision, Project administration. Alain Auger: Conceptualization, Validation, Writing – review & editing. Yvan Gauthier: Validation, Writing – review & editing.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.017 | 0.061 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.018 | 0.014 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".