Science foresight using life-cycle analysis, text mining and clustering: A case study on natural ventilation

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2017.02.027Get rights and content

Highlights

  • New three-step science foresight approach for automated detection of research gaps and trends

  • Combination of life cycle analysis, text mining and clustering analysis on peer-reviewed papers

  • The approach is able to identify research gaps in an effective and efficient way.

  • Automated tracking of evolution of research methods helps in interpretation of knowledge gaps.

  • Text mining of full-text research papers leads to better results than title and abstract only.

Abstract

Science foresight comprises a range of methods to analyze past, present and expected research trends, and uses this information to predict the future status of different fields of science and technology. With the ability to identify high-potential development directions, science foresight can be a useful tool to support the management and planning of future research activities. Science foresight analysts can choose from a rather large variety of approaches. There is, however, relatively little information about how the various approaches can be applied in an effective way. This paper describes a three-step methodological framework for science foresight on the basis of published research papers, consisting of (i) life-cycle analysis, (ii) text mining and (iii) knowledge gap identification by means of automated clustering. The three steps are connected using the research methodology of the research papers, as identified by text mining. The potential of combining these three steps in one framework is illustrated by analyzing scientific literature on wind catchers; a natural ventilation concept which has received considerable attention from academia, but with quite low application in practice. The knowledge gaps that are identified show that the automated foresight analysis is indeed able to find uncharted research areas. Results from a sensitivity analysis further show the importance of using full-texts for text mining instead of only title, keywords and abstract. The paper concludes with a reflection on the methodological framework, and gives directions for its intended use in future studies.

Keywords

Science foresight
Life-cycle analysis
Knowledge gap identification
Sensitivity analysis
Text mining
Wind catcher

Cited by (0)

Mina Rezaeian is a researcher in the Department of Economics, Management and Accounting at Yazd University, Iran. In 2015 she graduated from the same department as master in EMBA on a thesis “Science foresight on wind engineering in building physics: Application of text mining, morphological analysis and artificial Neural Network”. She has published 2 papers in national journals and 6 papers in the proceedings of different conferences.

Hamid Montazeri is a postdoctoral fellow of the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) in the Building Physics Section at KU Leuven in Belgium and part-time Assistant Professor in the Unit Building Physics and Services at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) in the Netherlands. His research focuses mainly on computational modeling of wind flow and heat and mass transfer in the urban environment. He has published 13 papers on these topics in international journals with peer review and more than 30 papers in the proceedings of international conferences.

Roel Loonen is doctoral researcher in the Unit Building Physics and Services at Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands. His research focuses on dynamic building envelopes, and how they can help transform the built environment towards more energy efficiency with better indoor environmental quality. He uses modeling and simulation to identify high-potential concepts for future facades and sustainable building systems. In addition, he is involved in the R&D process of a number of innovative building envelope technologies. Roel is author of 8 ISI journal publications, 1 book chapter, and more than 20 peer-reviewed papers in the proceedings of international conferences.

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