Decades of development: A bibliometric analysis of small modular reactor research
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study presents a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of global research trends on Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), based on 2080 peer-reviewed publications retrieved from Scopus and Web of Science as of February 2025. Through an analysis of keyword co-occurrence, publication sources, and the contributions of institutions and countries, the study identifies major research areas as well as emerging topics. Safety-related issues, including passive safety systems and natural circulation, remain dominant in the literature, while interest in next-generation reactor types, hybrid energy systems, and integration with renewables continues to grow. In contrast, non-technical dimensions such as public acceptance, policy frameworks, and waste management remain relatively underexplored. A country-level analysis shows that research output is concentrated in a few countries such as the United States, China, South Korea, and Canada, with leading institutions demonstrating topic-specific specialization. Network analysis confirms the centrality of safety-focused research while also identifying limited engagement with socio-political aspects. These findings suggest the need for interdisciplinary research and increased academic attention to issues such as economic feasibility, governance, and long-term waste strategies to support the successful commercialization of SMRs.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.058 | 0.083 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 it