Data mining on technical trends and international collaborations in the refractory ceramic area

The refractory field is a complex network in which long-term trends are determined based on the interaction between different players such as raw material producers, refractory manufacturers, end users, research centres and universities. As it is a complex system, it is very difficult to know who the leading participants are in the scientific development and what the future technologies and trends will be in the area. In order to retrieve this information, data mining and the graph theory were used to analyse publications from the major technical journals in the refractory area over the last 21 years. Based on this study, a complete map of the international collaboration of the different leading countries in the refractory field was attained. A common factor of these countries is the active working interaction, which helps them to tackle challenging problems with a high degree of complexity. In depth, technological trends were obtained from the analysis of selected keyword over the period considered showing a lack of technological breakthrough in the past 10 years. Furthermore, a strong increasing trend using different types of computer simulations to support the technological development of the refractories was observed.