Survey research of trends of the number of new doctors in materials science: spread of new research methods such as computational materials science and materials informatics in materials science

In recent years, it is expected to discover new materials, shorten the period of materials development, and reduce development costs by using computational materials science (CMS), materials informatics (MI). The necessity and importance of research and fostering researchers in these fields is increasing. However, there has been little quantitative analysis of trends in the number of fostering doctors in the CMS and MI fields in Japan.



We analyzed the doctoral dissertation titles in science and engineering at research universities in Japan using text data mining methods with keywords in CMS and MI, and we investigated trends in the number of fostering doctors related to them.



In the 1990s, there were many doctoral dissertation studies on neural networks, which is one of the basic of data science. Subsequently, we found that the number of doctoral dissertations containing various keywords related to MI in the title increased especially in 2010s, although the number of studies on neural networks themselves decreased after the 2000s.



The results of this analysis suggest that the development of researchers capable of utilizing MI, which has been gaining importance since the 2010s, is steadily advancing in materials science in Japan.