Defense Presentation Title: Spatiotemporal Analysis of Innovation Using an Automated Publication Screening

Advisor: Dr. Helena Mitasova, Associate Director of Earth and Environmental Sciences Applications

Abstract: Quantifying research and development publications to better understand the focus of research is common practice in knowledge synthesis. Literature reviews often explore a corpus of research publications by the data provided by content aggregators, or vigorous data extraction by researchers. Research locations are not often included. This research focuses on the use of research location, subtopics and publication years to identify trends in geographically dependent research. First, an inferential, spatiotemporal analysis is demonstrated, using public health publications, to determine variables that affect research production. These results are used to estimate the population of research over time and space. Next, this methodology is used in a production model where research location is considered as knowledge gained spillover, and publication location is considered as direct production. Lastly, an automated data extraction method is introduced to reduce the time needed to perform this analysis. Overall, this research demonstrates that understanding research production by research location is important for understanding where, when and what affects research trends in geographically dependent fields of study, and it offers a method for achieving these results quickly.