General Record Characteristics
Total number of authors in records 24098, average number of authors per publication 4.8. The number of unique authors is 12324.
Table 2 shows the list of 30 authors and the number of their publications in the exported bibliometric records.
The table shows the dominance of Chinese authors, which is consistent with the fact that China is experiencing high growth in energy consumption due to economic development [
7]. China is a leader in renewable energy. It’s a policy aimed at economic growth, environmental protection and reducing dependence on imports [
8,
9].
Below is the list of countries with the highest publication activity. Affiliation was assessed by the number of records in which the name of the country appeared, i.e. the number of publications in which at least one author was affiliated with that country.
China|Hong Kong → 1962, USA → 1072, ‘UK|U\.K’ → 377, Canada → 327, India → 299, Saudi Arabia → 286, South Korea → 272, Singapore → 191, Italy → 170, Germany → 160, Iran → 125, Taiwan → 127, Japan → 110, Malaysia → 98, Brazil → 90, France → 83, Finland → 78, Switzerland → 67, Portugal → 50, South Africa → 31, Russian Federation|Russia → 26. The low number of affiliations with Russia is most often explained by two factors: many Russian authors publish in Russian journals, many Russian journals only accept articles in Russian.
The dominance of Chinese affiliations is consistent with the data on authors; in addition, authors with Chinese surnames may also appear with USA, UK, Canada, Singapore affiliations.
The Author Affiliations field in the bibliometric records of the IEEE Xplore platform is fairly uniformly populated, but there may be slightly different spellings, e.g., ‘5GIC and 6GIC, Institute for Communication Systems (ICS), University of Surrey, Guildford, U. K.’ and ‘5GIC and 6GIC, Institute for Communication Systems, University of Surrey, Guildford, U. K.’. K’ and ‘5GIC and 6GIC, Institute for Communication Systems, University of Surrey, Guildford, U.K.’, therefore
Table 3 was compiled in two stages: first, the occurrence of affiliations was counted, and then the possibility of their different spellings was checked for the most frequent ones. Other option: the author may have multiple affiliations, e.g. ‘National Key Laboratory of Science and Technology on Multispectral Information Processing, School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China’.
Below are examples of the three most frequent affiliations with different spellings, with → followed by the frequency of occurrence.
School of Electrical and Information Engineering, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia → 100
the School of Electrical and Information Engineering, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia→ 2
School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China → 78
Key Laboratory of Image Processing and Intelligent Control, School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China → 19
National Key Laboratory of Science and Technology on Multispectral Information Processing, School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China → 12
Key Laboratory of Ministry of Education for Image Processing and Intelligent Control, School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China → 9
National Key Laboratory of Science and Technology on Multispectral Information Processing and Key Laboratory of Image Processing and Intelligent Control, School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China → 6
Key Laboratory of Imaging Processing and Intelligence Control, School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China → 5
Key Laboratory of Image Processing and Intelligent Control of Ministry of Education, School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China → 4
Key Laboratory of Image Processing and Intelligent Control, Ministry of Education, School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China → 3
Key Laboratory of Imaging Processing and Intelligent Control, School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China → 3
Key Laboratory of the Ministry of Education for Image Processing and Intelligent Control, School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China → 3
Image Processing and Intelligent Control Key Laboratory of Education Ministry of China, School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China → 2
Key Laboratory of Image Information Processing and Intelligent Control, School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China → 2
Key Laboratory of Image Processing and Intelligent Control of Education Ministry, School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China → 2
Key Laboratory on Image Information Processing and Intelligent Control of Ministry of Education, School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China → 2
Engineering Research Center of Autonomous Intelligent Unmanned Systems, Key Laboratory of Image Processing and Intelligent Control, School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China → 1
School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore → 69
School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore → 22
Delta-NTU Corporate Laboratory for Cyber-Physical Systems, School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore → 3
Department of School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore → 2
Note: for the first 30 most frequent affiliations, variants containing abbreviations in parentheses and differences in word case were not found.
Considering the above, we compile
Table 3 as follows: the number of matches was checked by a direct search for the shortest spelling of the affiliation, e.g., ‘School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China’, Two values were calculated: the number of records in which the affiliation spelling occurred (reflecting the number of publications with this affiliation
N2) and the total number of occurrences of the affiliation (reflecting the number of authors with this affiliation
N1).
Table 3.
Top 30 examples of frequently occurring affiliations.
Table 3.
Top 30 examples of frequently occurring affiliations.
| Author Affiliations |
N1 |
N2 |
| School of Electrical and Information Engineering, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia |
102 |
38 |
| School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China |
151 |
58 |
| School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore |
96 |
54 |
| Department of Electrical Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China |
84 |
38 |
| School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore |
61 |
31 |
| College of Electrical Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China |
52 |
27 |
| State Key Laboratory of Networking and Switching Technology, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China |
52 |
14 |
| Department of Energy Technology, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark |
50 |
27 |
| Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA |
48 |
21 |
| College of Electrical and Information Engineering, Hunan University, Changsha, China |
47 |
20 |
| Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA, USA |
64 |
15 |
| School of Electrical Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, China |
44 |
20 |
| State Key Laboratory of Alternate Electrical Power System with Renewable Energy Sources, North China Electric Power University, Beijing, China |
44 |
15 |
| China Electric Power Research Institute, Beijing, China |
65 |
33 |
| College of Artificial Intelligence, Nankai University, Tianjin, China |
54 |
13 |
| College of Electrical Engineering, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China |
41 |
15 |
| College of Electrical Engineering and New Energy, China Three Gorges University, Yichang, China |
40 |
12 |
| College of Energy and Electrical Engineering, Hohai University, Nanjing, China |
39 |
12 |
| School of Electrical Engineering, Northeast Electric Power University, Jilin, China |
37 |
15 |
| IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, USA |
36 |
4 |
| School of Control and Computer Engineering, North China Electric Power University, Beijing, China |
38 |
18 |
| School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA |
39 |
15 |
| School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China |
36 |
10 |
| State Key Laboratory of Management and Control for Complex Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China |
34 |
10 |
| Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Institute of Technology, Nirma University, Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India |
33 |
7 |
| Department of Electrical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China |
41 |
17 |
| Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University of Bath, Bath, U.K. |
39 |
13 |
| School of Electric Power Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China |
33 |
13 |
| School of Electrical and Information Engineering, Tianjin University, Tianjin, China |
38 |
18 |
| State Key Laboratory for Management and Control of Complex Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China |
35 |
16 |
The data shows the dominance of Chinese affiliations in the table: China → 20 lines, followed by the U.S. → 4 lines, Singapore → 2, U.K., Australia, India, Denmark → 1.
A well populated ‘Author Affiliations’ field in the bibliometric data of IEEE Xplore platform allows for other studies, such as tracking scholarly collaborations by matching author affiliations. But this is beyond the scope of this study.
Main Topics of Institutions
In order to assess the predominant themes of the institutions, the ‘IEEE Terms’ were used. The choice of ‘IEEE Terms’ is due to their normalized spelling and peer review, unlike the Author keywords, which require preprocessing, such as lemmatization and the use of a list of synonyms.
The data in
Table 3 were used as queries on the ‘Author Affiliations’ field of the general table of exported data. The query results defined ‘IEEE terms’ corresponding to this affiliation.
Alluvial diagrams are a handy way many-to-many mapping data such as ‘Author Affiliations’ and ‘IEEE terms’. To construct it, we need to build a correspondence table ‘Author Affiliations’ and ‘IEEE terms’. In order to place Alluvial diagrams in the article, the number of entries in the table has to be reduced, since even for the first 10 affiliations from
Table 3, the total occurrence of ‘IEEE Terms’ was 2262 results. Of these, 608 were unique terms. For such a large number of terms Alluvial diagram for a printed article cannot be built, it is necessary to select the terms. The easiest way is to use the frequency of occurrence of terms from the total list of 2263 results and select the top 30 terms from them. The list of such terms is shown in
Table 4.
After these steps, out of 2262 ‘IEEE Terms’ records and the first 10 affiliations from
Table 3, 620 rows remain to construct the Alluvial diagram shown in
Figure 2.
Main Topics of Journals
Of particular interest to experts may be the subject matter of the journals represented in IEEE Xplore on the topic under study ( ‘Machine Learning OR Artificial Intelligence for Power Systems OR Energy Systems’ ‘Machine Learning OR Artificial Intelligence for Power Systems OR Energy Systems’) expressed in ‘IEEE Terms’. Such knowledge can simplify query composition using ‘IEEE Terms’, e.g., (‘IEEE Terms’:Random forest).
A total of 179 unique values occur in the ‘Publication Title’ field in the sample examined, the 30 with the highest number of articles are presented in
Table 5.
For the top 10 journals from
Table 5, their subject matter expressed in the most frequent ‘IEEE Terms’ was determined. These 10 journals represent 2,943 entries out of a total of 5,000. The converted file containing one ‘IEEE Terms’ per line contains 21709 entries and 1654 unique ‘IEEE Terms’. The top 30 of them are shown in
Table 6.
Of the terms in the main query: ‘Machine learning’ → 477 occurs more often than ‘Artificial intelligence’ → 228. ‘Power system stability’ → 261 and ‘Power systems’ → 153 indicate that in this topic the term ‘Power systems’ and its combinations are more common than ‘Energy systems’. For the terms Deep learning → 263 and Reinforcement learning → 141 a separate study is advisable.
The Alluvial diagram shown in
Figure 3 is constructed for the top 10 journals and the 30 most frequent ‘IEEE Terms’ in them.
In the journal list, the full title, ‘IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers’, is replaced by the short one, ‘IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems’.
As an alternative Alluvial diagram data can be presented as pivot
Table 7.
The use of Alluvial diagram or Pivot table depends on the task at hand and personal preference.
Using the VOSviewer program for clustering ‘IEEE Terms’
‘IEEE Terms’ can be used similarly to Scopus Index Keywords to identify the subject matter of the collected bibliometric data using the VOSviewer program.
Figure 4 shows the clustering of ‘IEEE Terms’. The graph is constructed with the following parameters: total unique ‘IEEE Terms’ - 2608 of them 918 occur 5 or more times, the co-occurrence network is constructed for 400 terms in the highest total strength. At the same time, 5 clusters were obtained and visualized using the LinLog/modularity algorithm.
The most common “IEEE Terms” for all 5 clusters are summarized in
Table 8.
Table 9 presents the top 10 ‘IEEE Terms’ for each of the 5 clusters. These terms reveal the main themes of the clusters.
The trend of change in the topics of publications described by the terms of each cluster over time can be assessed by comparing the data in
Table 9 and
Table 10, which presents the terms most frequently occurring in new publications. The assessment was made by the parameter Avg.pub.year, which reflects the average year of the publication in which the term appears.
Using the combination of terms from the two tables it is possible to actualize queries for publlications described by terms from each cluster.
For example, for the term ‘machine learning’ of the first cluster, the relevant issues can be represented by the terms: accuracy, computational efficiency, random forests, and for the term ‘predictive models’ of the fifth cluster from
Table 9 by the terms ‘long short term memory’ and ‘transformers’.
Another important criterion for selecting terms to identify relevant research topics may be the citation rate of publications with “IEEE Terms” in their bibliometric records. According to the VOSviewer guidelines, this indicator is proposed to be evaluated by the parameter Avg.norm.citations - average normalized citations. The data for the top 10 ‘IEEE Terms’ for each of the 5 clusters with the highest Avg.norm.citations are presented in
Table 11.
Example of using terms from the three tables for the first cluster: feature extraction, computational efficiency, signal processing algorithms, intrusion detection. For the fourth cluster, an interesting topic can be described by the terms: power system stability, mathematical models, nonlinear dynamical systems, frequency control.
There are repetitions in
Table 9,
Table 10 and
Table 11, for example, a term may be “highly cited” and “frequently occurring”. Such repetitions were removed when constructing the graphs, so that fewer than 30 datasets were actually used for construction - 28 to 26.
In the fourth and largest cluster in
Figure 5, the term ‘transfer learning’ is found in new publications and has a relatively high citation rate compared to the terms in this cluster. Here is a publication in which this term appears in a quote: “this article proposes a novel phasor measurement unit (PMU) measurements-based STVSA method by using deep
transfer learning"[
10]. In the third cluster, the topic described by the terms ‘intrusion detection’ and ‘accuracy’ described by the quotation from the publication [
11] may be of interest: “Cyber
intrusion detection systems ... power system protection schemes. The
accuracy and time to detect cyber attacks ... are two key factors for reliable ... smart grids.” For the terms ‘pipelines’ and ‘computational efficiency’, we can suggest the paper [
12] with the quote, “In this paper ... a
computationally efficient framework ... to rank the importance of filters and thus converting a three-step
pipeline”
Let’s take the non-obvious combination of terms — metaheuristics and q-learning for which an interesting publication can be found [
13]. Explanatory quote from the abstract: "Embedding Q-Learning in the selection of metaheuristic operators..." .
The terms ‘digital twins’ and ‘federated learning’ reflect the topical aspect of learning models without violating data privacy, an example of such an approach is presented in the paper [
14]. Explanatory quote from the abstract: "Federated learning (FL) based digital twin (DT) model framework could be seen as an emerging paradigm to avoid large communication loads and high data leakage".
For the terms ‘regulation’ and ‘mathematical models’ a quote can be given"... voltage regulation applications ... based on a developed mathematical model to control the output voltage ..." from the article [
15].
The fourth cluster’s emerging theme (
Figure 9), expressed in terms ‘transformers’ and ‘long short term memory’ can be represented by a quote"Incipient Faults in Power Transformers ... Bi-Directional Long Short-Term Memory Network" from the article [
16].
Convex hull chart for ‘IEEE Terms’ as an indicator of Research fronts
To determine something similar to a research front, but not based on publications, rather on ‘IEEE Terms’, one can do it as follows — select the terms with the highest average citation rates and display them in the coordinates of Avg.pub.year and Avg.norm.citations in the form of a ‘Convex hull chart’. The diagram for the top 30 ‘IEEE Terms’ from all clusters is presented in
Figure 10.
The right border of the green area can be interpreted as the actual thematic front described by the terms: ‘medical services’, ‘manufacturing’, ‘6g mobile communication’, ‘array signal processing’, ‘privacy’, ‘wireless communication’.
If using modern search engines for scientific publications, for example, scite.ai, it is possible to get a proposal for a highly cited article that best reflects the topic described by the above terms. Unlike ‘classical’ search, where the output must match the terms in the query with logical operators, in AI search the output indicates that the article is more likely to be ‘relevant’ to the terms listed compared to other publications. An example of such an article is [
17], suggested by scite.ai for the set of terms listed above, but containing only the terms ‘6g’ and ‘wireless communication’ in the title and abstract, but due to the review nature of the article it may be useful in a broader context relevant to the terms listed.
Figure 11 shows the 30 ‘IEEE Terms’ with the highest ‘Total Link Strength’, i.e. the terms most frequently co-occurring with other terms. Such terms can be seen as reflecting the overall context of the topic at hand. An interesting query can be composed of terms reflecting the general context (field of application) and, for example, terms with high citation rates, which may reflect the relevance of the issue under study.
There is a significant difference between
Figure 10 and
Figure 11. In the latter, the term ‘mathematical models’ is found in new publications, while in highly cited articles the term refers to the dominance of earlier publications.
In contrast to
Figure 11, which contains frequently co-occurring terms, a ‘Convex hull chart’ can be constructed for rarely co-occurring terms, see
Figure 12.
In our context, ‘nonlinear dynamical systems’ and ‘observers’ rarely co-occur with other terms. But in a general search for the terms ‘nonlinear dynamical systems’ and ‘observers’, a search for ‘(‘All Metadata’:nonlinear dynamical systems) AND (‘All Metadata’:observers)’ for 2020-2024 yields 5,736 results; Conferences (3,789) and Journals (1,875). Thus in a broad context this topic is relevant. For example, the article [
18] has been cited 205 times (current as of August 20, 2024). A quote revealing the content of the publication "A new approach to the design of nonlinear disturbance observers (DOBs) for a class of nonlinear systems described by input-output differential equations is presented in this paper".
It can be seen that the topic studied in this paper and the topic described by the terms ‘nonlinear dynamical systems’ and ‘observers’ have little overlap, but the topics themselves are extensive. In such cases, by looking closely at their intersection, it is possible to formulate a promising problem that is not yet well represented in publications but has the potential for development. For example, for the ‘observers for nonlinear dynamical systems’ problem, one can explore the use of ‘Machine learning’ to find the optimal parameters of ‘observers for nonlinear dynamical systems’ and ‘nonlinear dynamical systems’ can be narrowed down to ‘Power Systems OR Energy Systems’.
Applying the FP-growth algorithm to detect co-occurrence of ‘IEEE Terms’
As the previous analysis showed, it is most interesting to create queries containing multiple terms. The use of multiple term co-occurrence estimation can be accomplished using the well-known FP-growth algorithm.
Figure 13 shows the result of applying this algorithm to identify the co-occurrence of ‘IEEE Terms’ in the records with the highest citations as an Alluvial diagram. Records with 20 or more citations from the ‘Article Citation Count’ column were used. Individual words in ‘IEEE Terms’ are joined by underscores.
‘Load modeling’, ‘Deep learning’, ‘Forecasting’ and ‘Predictive models’ — an example of the co-occurrence of four ‘IEEE Terms’ in highly cited records. The 2021 article [
19], cited 143 times (current as of August 21, 2024) found in IEEE Xplore by request ‘("All Metadata":’Load modeling’) AND ("All Metadata":’Predictive models’) AND ("All Metadata":’Forecasting’) AND ("All Metadata":’Deep learning’)’ can serve as an example of a publication revealing the topic described by these terms.
The results presented in
Figure 13 can be compared with those for 2024 with citations, see
Figure 14.
Figure 14 displays the dominant theme described by the terms: ‘Microgrids’ ‘Optimization’ ‘Renewable energy sources’ ‘Costs’. Example of a publication disclosing this topic [
20] and corresponding to the query: ‘("All Metadata":Microgrids) AND ("All Metadata":Costs) AND ("All Metadata":Renewable energy sources) AND ("All Metadata":Optimization)’. A quote revealing the topic: "The generation sources of a microgrid system mainly include distributed generators and renewable energy sources. The improved artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm is proposed to solve this generation cost optimization."
Hierarchical clustering of ‘IEEE Terms’
Hierarchical clustering is the most easily interpretable clustering algorithm.
The plots shown in
Figure 15 and
Figure 16 are obtained using Multidendrograms-5.2.1 with clustering parameters: Type of measure → Similarity; Precision → 3; Clustering algorithm → ‘Beta Flexible’ and ‘Weighted’. Inkscape was used to add color to the dendrograms. The co-occurrence of ‘IEEE Terms’ was determined using the FP-growth utility.
The analysis of these dendrograms allows us to compare the overall co-occurrence of terms and the terms co-occurrence inherent in the most cited publications.
These dendrograms allow us to compare the total co-occurrence of ‘IEEE Terms’ and ‘IEEE Terms’ inherent in the most cited publications.