A scientometric study of heat transfer journal literature from 1900 to 2017

The present study conducts a scientometric study of the journal literature of heat transfer from 1900 to 2017 based on the database of Web of Science, 2018. A total of 120,628 items resulted from topic search using “heat transfer” as the search term. The results of this work reveal that the literature on heat transfer grows exponentially with an annual growth rate of about 9.71% for the last century the first two decades of this century through the emergence of new subjects, identified through word cloud of authors' keywords. The document types, countries and languages, journal distribution, number of authors, institution productivity and paper citations are analyzed. Highly productive journals and authors and highly cited papers are identified. The results reveal that USA and China are the two most productive countries contributing 17.4% and 14.3%, respectively. About 90% of papers are published with co-authors and 73% of the paper was published with two to four authors. The author distribution follows the trend of Lotka's law, with 61.3% of the authors published only one paper, and 15.9% of the authors published two papers. International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer is the most productive journal contributing 9.4% of the publications. Most highly cited papers are identified and found to be consist with the emergence of new subjects in heat transfer.