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Identifying the users and impact of research is important for research performers, managers, evaluators, and sponsors. It is important to know whether the audience reached is the audience desired. It is useful to understand the technical characteristics of the other research/development/applications impacted by the originating research, and to understand other characteristics (names, organizations, countries) of the users impacted by the research. Because of the many indirect pathways through which fundamental research can impact applications, identifying the user audience and the research impacts can be very complex and time consuming. The purpose of this article is to describe a novel approach for identifying the pathways through which research can impact other research, technology development, and applications, and to identify the technical and infrastructure characteristics of the user population. A novel literature-based approach was developed to identify the user community and its characteristics. The research performed is characterized by one or more articles accessed by the Science Citation Index (SCI) database, beccause the SCI's citation-based structure enables the capability to perform citation studies easily.The user community is characterized by the articles in the SCI that cite the original research articles, and that cite the succeeding generations of these articles as well. Text mining is performed on the citing articles to identify the technical areas impacted by the research, the relationships among these technical areas, and relationships among the technical areas and the infrastructure (authors, journals, organizations). A key component of text mining, concept clustering, was used to provide both a taxonomy of the citing articles' technical themes and further technical insights based on theme relationships arising from the grouping process. Bibliometrics is performed on the citing articles to profile the user characteristics. Citation Mining, this integration of citation bibliometrics and text mining, is applied to the 307 first generation citing articles of a fundamental physics article on the dynamics of vibrating sand-piles. Most of the 307 citing articles were basic research whose main themes were aligned with those of the cited article. However, about 20% of the citing articles were research or development in other disciplines, or development within the same discipline. The text mining alone identified the intradiscipline applications and extradiscipline impacts and applications; this was confirmed by detailed reading of the 307 abstracts. The combination of citation bibliometrics and text mining provides a synergy unavailable with each approach taken independently. Furthermore, text mining is a REQUIREMENT for a feasible comprehensive research impact determination. The integrated multigeneration citation analysis required for broad research impact determination of highly cited articles will produce thousands or tens or hundreds of thousands of citing article Abstracts. Text mining allows...

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Database tomography (DT) is a textual database analysis system consisting of two major components: (1) algorithms for extracting multiword phrase frequencies and phrase proximities (physical closeness of the multiword technical phrases) from any type of large textual database, to augment (2) interpretative capabilities of the expert human analyst. DT was used to derive technical intelligence from a fullerenes database derived from the Science Citation Index and the Engineering Compendex. Phrase frequency analysis by the technical domain experts provided the pervasive technical themes of the fullerenes database, and phrase proximity analysis provided the relationships among the pervasive technical themes. Bibliometric analysis of the fullerenes literature supplemented the DT results with author/journal/institution publication and citation data. Comparisons of fullerenes results with past analyses of similarly structured near-earth space, chemistry, hypersonic/supersonic flow, aircraft, and ship hydrodynamics databases are made. One important finding is that many of the normalized bibliometric distribution functions are extremely consistent across these diverse technical domains and could reasonably be expected to apply to broader chemical topics than fullerenes that span multiple structural classes. Finally, lessons learned about integrating the technical domain experts with the data mining tools are presented.