‘State-of-the-art’ of ‘state-of-the-art’: Extracting science-social issues interface

Science and technology had contributed to solve various social issues like vaccine for preventing disease and internet for exchanging information. It is important for technology intelligence to comprehend social issues and candidates of technologies for solving them from a vast stream of information flow. However, as the amount of information has been exploded, it has become quite difficult to grasp the current status of advancement of scientific research and technologies. In this study, we proposed and demonstrated that “state-of-the-art (SOTA)” was an effective term for extracting interface between science and social issues. First, in order to test effectiveness of the proposed approach, papers of sustainability fields were collected. Those papers were divided into three types: SOTA papers, review papers and the others. Then, some characteristics of those types of papers were surveyed. We analyzed what kinds of impact the term had, the possibility of comprehensiveness of usage. The results showed that paper of SOTA was technically characteristic term when researchers and practitioner set their direction.