A systematic approach for integrated trend analysis—The case of etching

Understanding technology development trends is of critical importance to countries, industries and enterprises to be sustainable in global competition. Attempts have been made to establish trend analysis by bibliometric and patent analyses. Also text-mining uncovers hidden and important information from structured or unstructured documents which serve as knowledge carriers. This study aims to provide a systematic approach for integrated trend analysis that takes into account bibliometric analysis, patent analysis and text-mining analysis. Etching is selected as the case study for integrating trend analysis method proposed in this study. Also, validity and applicability of the integrated analysis are evaluated.