Emerging Technology Identification and Selection Based on Data-Driven: Taking the Unmanned Systems as an Example

The identification and selection of emerging technologies has always been a hot field concerned by countries, armed forces and enterprises. Selecting emerging technologies from huge amounts of data is helpful to grasp technological frontiers and technological advantages. We use the unmanned system papers collected in Web of Science (WoS) database as datasets. Firstly, the bibliographic coupling network is constructed. And then the key technologies in the field of unmanned systems are identified by using the complex network community detection algorithm. Finally, the emerging technologies in the field of unmanned systems are screened according to the four indicators of novelty, popularity, influence and growth. We have successfully identified 113 key technologies in the field of unmanned systems and selected 10 of them as emerging technologies. The effectiveness and feasibility of the method have been verified by the evaluation of the research team, which is of great significance for the identification, assessment and prediction of technology.