Graphene - A rising star in view of scientometrics

We have carried out a scientometric analysis of the literature dealing with graphene, a material which has been identified as a new carbon allotrope. The investigation is based on the CAplus database of Chemical Abstracts Service, the INSPEC database of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Web of Science (WoS) of Thomson Reuters. The time evolution of the publications shows a dramatic increase since 2004 when graphene has been isolated for the first time. The graphene literature has been analyzed with respect to the most productive authors, research organizations, countries of authors, and the leading journals. Furthermore, the time evolution of the major graphene based research topics and the top 10 most productive research organizations with respect to their specific topics have been analyzed and are shown as heat maps. In addition, the graphene research landscape has been established using the analysis tool STN AnaVist. Finally, a brief citation analysis has been performed. The time evolution of the impact reveals that, rather similar to the output evolution, the impact increase of the graphene papers within the starting period is possibly going to outrun the impact increase of the fullerenes and nanotubes papers.