Why IEEE Xplore Matters for Research Trend Analysis in the Energy Sector

Abstract

The paper aims to briefly compare and analyze the results of queries to IEEE Xplore and the leading abstract databases Scopus and Web of Science to identify research trends. Some errors were revealed in the Author Keywords in Web of Science. Therefore, a more detailed analysis that involved comparing various types of key terms was made only for IEEE Xplore and Scopus platforms. The study employed IEEE Access journal metadata as indexed on both platforms. Sample matching for IEEE Xplore and Scopus was achieved by comparing DOI. The IEEE Xplore metadata contains more key term types, which provides an advantage in analyzing research trends. Using NSPEC Controlled Terms from expert-compiled vocabulary provides more stable data, which gives an advantage when considering the change of terms over time. Apriori, an algorithm for finding association rules, was used to compare the co-occurrence of the terms for a more detailed description of sample subjects on both platforms. VOSviewer was used to analyze trends in scientific research based on IEEE Xplore data. The 2011-2021 ten-year period was divided into two sub-intervals for comparing the occurrence of Author Keywords, IEEE Terms, and NSPEC Controlled Terms. Bibliometric data of the IEEE conference proceedings was used to illustrate the importance of context in estimating the growth rate of publishing activity on a topic of interest.