Developing and applying a metric for estimating trends in databases of articles : its possible use in research and science policy

The research presented very briefly in this paper aims to develop and apply a metric for estimating trends in databases of articles. The motivation for estimating trends in these databases is that these trends are possibly of interest in research and science policy. The objectives of this paper are to introduce the metric (called ‘absolute term incidences’), and to compare this metric with the metric used by Braun and Schubert and Gu (called ‘term frequencies’), in addition to briefly present some potential uses and limitations of absolute term incidences. This research is part of my Doctoral project on bibliometrics and policy.