Development trajectory and research themes of foresight

•A unique approach is adopted to identify the major research themes of the 'broad foresight'.•1439 papers covering 1977 to 2015 from WOS are analyzed.•Main path analysis and edge-betweenness clustering are adopted.•Three major and three medium-sized research themes are revealed.•Overall development trajectories of broad foresight are presented.

This study integrates the edge-betweenness clustering technique and key-route main path analysis to analyse the 'broad foresight' literature. We retrieve the relevant papers from the Thomson Reuters Web of Science databases and construct the citation network among them. The edge-betweenness clustering identifies six research groups in the 'broad foresight' literature. Three major research groups and their major research themes are 'technology foresight', 'futures studies', and 'technology forecasting'. The other three are 'scenario analysis', 'future-oriented technology analysis (FTA)', and 'technology forecasting using data envelopment analysis (TFDEA)'. We apply main path analysis to explore the overall development trajectory and the linkage among different research groups. We believe that the results are valuable for those who are interested in comprehending the overall development picture of 'broad foresight'. The approach used herein is also applicable to other fields.