A Scientometric Analysis of Global Terahertz Research by Web of Science Data

Terahertz is a high-tech technology that has been developed rapidly in recent years. Relevant research has been extensively carried out in physics, chemistry, communication, biology, agricultural food safety testing, industrial non-destructive testing, biochemical, medical, and biological imaging. To provide a summary of the research trend in the field, there is a need to analyze the literature by scientometrics. In this work, we have an overview of the literature in the terahertz field, and then analyze the literature from the aspects of terahertz source, terahertz detector, terahertz spectroscopy and imaging, and terahertz applications respectively. The focus of this work is to automatically extract the trend by co-words and co-citation network analysis, and the comparative point of view is used to understand two closely related but different fields of terahertz basic research and terahertz application research. Through the scientific basis measurement, the research characteristics of these two fields, including annual outputs, active journals, key authors, key research directions and hotspots, important research projects and the countries behind them are immediately obtained.