The ability to promptly recognise new research trends is strategic for many stakeholders, such as academics, institutional funding bodies, academic publishers and companies. While the state of the art presents several works on the identification of novel research topics, detecting the emergence of a new research area at a very early stage, i.e., when the area has not been even explicitly labelled and is associated with very few publications, is still an open challenge. This limitation hinders the ability of the aforementioned stakeholders to timely react to the emergence of new areas in the research landscape.

In this presentation I will talk about my postgraduate research. It aims to tackle this challenge and therefore provide a system able to early detect research trends. I will firstly show what kind of indexes I devised to empirically identify recurring patterns, that can lead to the emergence of a new topic. I will then present the results I obtained for my first study, and the partial results I found in my second and current study. I will end the talk with a brief look at some research challenges that still need to be addressed.