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Is my topic rising?

Type a research term: the curve shows, week after week, how many of the new arXiv papers use it in their title or abstract, out of 10,000. If the curve climbs, more and more researchers write about it.

← The rising topics of the week

In: All of arXiv. One to three words, as in a title; plurals count with their singular. Premium compares three terms, in any field or category, and exports the counts. Discover Premium

Examples: sparse autoencodermixture of expertsstate space modelJWSTquantum error correction

How it works

  1. Every week, we read the title and abstract of every new paper on arXiv (first versions only, not updates) and note the terms of one to three words they use.
  2. For your term, we count the papers using it each week, and divide by all the papers of that week. A share rather than a number: arXiv grows every year, so the number of papers would rise for almost every topic, while the share rises only when the topic takes a larger place.
  3. The answer at the top compares the last 13 weeks with the 13 weeks before. The topic "rises" only when its share is at least ×1.2 and the gap is too large to come from chance, a test of the same kind as for the rising topics of the week; it "declines" in the same way the other way round.

How to read it

  • A curve that climbs over several months: more and more teams write about the topic. A peak that falls back after a few weeks: an event, a release, a data set or a conference deadline.
  • The height matters less than the trend: a broad term (graph neural network) is always higher than a precise one (equivariant message passing). To compare two topics, compare how their curves move.
  • The terms are counted as words, in English, plurals with their singular. A term with several meanings counts them all (transformer, in electrical engineering and in AI): then try a more specific term. A week where a single paper uses the term counts as zero.
  • The curve says how much the topic is written about, not whether the papers are good or cited, nor what is published outside arXiv.

Why it is useful

  • Check an impression: "everyone is working on it" — true, or only in the papers you happen to see?
  • Choose a thesis or project subject: a rising topic draws funding and competition; a declining one may be maturing, or being left aside.
  • Back up a "growing interest" in a grant proposal or an introduction with a number. When citing it, name the source and the period.
  • Compare competing methods or instruments week by week, to see which one is taking over. Premium

The rising topics of the week work the other way round: instead of checking a term you chose, they find by themselves the terms that jumped this week. The rising topics of the week