Texas A&M Transportation Institute (TTI) Assistant Research Scientist Subasish Das published the article, “Data Dive Into Transportation Research Record Articles: Authors, Coauthorships and Research Trends,” in the Jan.–Feb. 2021 issue of TR News, the Transportation Research Board’s bimonthly magazine.
In the article, Das examines the Transportation Research Board’s Transportation Research Record (TRR), a peer-reviewed journal. He looks at TRR’s history, the journal’s aim and scope, keywords and topics across time, prolific TRR authors, and author collaborations via the coauthorship network. As part of the study, he developed an interactive, web-based tool, the TRR Coauthor Graphic (2001–2018), where TRR authors can see who is in their coauthorship network. Das found that TRR has published more articles as the years increased and TRR covers a wide array of transportation-related topics. He also found that the coauthorship network is complex, which indicates a variety of coauthorships among TRR authors.
“The depth and breadth of the research published in TRR over the years is indicative of changing emphases in transportation research. I performed a research trend analysis using metadata from articles published over the last 40 years,” says Das. “The rapid rise of new technologies and a commensurate growth in peer-reviewed publications, as well as a greater emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration, has revolutionized transportation research, as indicated by my findings.”