ETO's Research Almanac provides high-level data on trends in English-language emerging technology research, including overall research output, growth, and trends among countries, research institutions, and companies active in R&D. The initial version of the Almanac focuses on topics and applications in artificial intelligence.
Use the Almanac to:
The Almanac relies on ETO's Merged Academic Corpus. Read more >>
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The Almanac tool and metrics are subject to ETO's general terms of use. If you use the tool, please cite us. The underlying datasets are not publicly available due to licensing restrictions.
If you use data from the Almanac in your work, please cite the "Emerging Technology Observatory Research Almanac" and include the link to the tool.
These instructions focus on the desktop version of the tool. Some features may be missing or act differently on mobile devices.
The Almanac is a simple dashboard-style tool. Start by choosing a research topic:
Each topic page has several sections. Scroll down to browse through them, or click a link in the left-hand navigation menu to jump to a specific section.
When viewing line charts, click on an item in the chart legend to hide (or redisplay) the corresponding line.
Some sections have a "top-cited" toggle. Click the toggle to display data on the 10% of articles in each year with the most citations, rather than all articles. (Articles are assigned to years based on their date of publication.)
When you click on a link in the left-hand navigation menu, your browser's address bar will update to reflect the section you're viewing. Copy the URL in order to return to the same view later:
Track trends in research across different emerging technology fields and subfields.
Understand how different countries contribute to English-language research in each field and how their contributions are changing over time.
Explore the impact of research on patents and the broader scientific literature.
View the top research institutions and companies conducting English-language research in different fields.
Analyze trends within highly cited research only, and see how they compare to trends among all research in a given emerging tech field.
Analyzing specific subtopics, research institutions, or companies in detail. The Almanac provides high-level information on a limited number of emerging tech fields and actors. For more detailed analysis, we recommend using the Map of Science or Country Activity Tracker.
Determining which countries or organizations are "ahead" or "behind" overall in emerging tech. Emerging technology activity is multifaceted. Public research output is one of these facets, but there are many others, from commercializing and deploying new technologies to building institutions that can effectively use and govern them. Understanding how countries, research institutions, and companies compare and compete and in emerging tech requires understanding all of these facets. Because the Almanac focuses on a single indicator, it shouldn't be used on its own to draw conclusions about the overall state of play.
Drawing definitive conclusions about China's overall research output. The Almanac only covers English-language articles (defined as articles with English titles or abstracts), but Chinese authors and organizations often publish in Chinese. A full accounting of China's research output would need to consider these Chinese-language articles as well as English-language articles.
The Almanac relies on article-level metadata from ETO's Merged Academic Corpus (MAC). When you visit a topic's Almanac page, you'll see facts and figures derived from English-language articles from a recent five-year period that are tagged with that topic. To learn more about how we apply topic tags to MAC articles, visit the MAC documentation.
It's important to note that emerging research topics have fuzzy boundaries; there's no objectively correct answer to whether a particular article is "AI safety" research (for example). For each emerging topic, we try to capture articles in the MAC that subject matter experts would consider highly relevant to the topic in question. This inevitably involves some judgment calls. In addition, we rely on statistical models to apply the topic tags. For both reasons, the numbers in the Almanac are necessarily imprecise and should be interpreted as estimates. Read more >>
For purposes of the Almanac, we isolate English-language articles by filtering out every MAC article without an English-language title or abstract.
The Almanac updates as the Merged Academic Corpus is updated. Read more >>
Use our general issue reporting form.
11/22/23 | Major data update following MAC changes |
5/19/23 | Initial release |