Evaluation innovation research performance and trend of the worldwide

Innovation is one of the most important fields in research and development of new knowledge or service today, making research innovation trend is an important issue. This study evaluates the worldwide innovation development trend of research for the past sixteen years and provides insights into the characteristics of innovation research activities to identify an innovation development map, tendencies, or regularities that may exist in papers. Data are based on the online version of SSCI, Web of Science from 1993 to 2008. Articles referring to innovation were assessed according to many aspects including exponentially fitting publication outputs during 2002-2008, distribution of source title, author keywords, and keyword plus analysis. The exponential fitting of the yearly publications of the last decade can also calculate that, in 2014, the number of scientific papers on innovation will be twice the number of publications in 2008. Synthetically analyzing four kinds of keywords, this work analysis concludes that innovation application relates to issues based on knowledge, technology, R&D and entrepreneurship. The result displays that the USA is number one in innovation research totaling 6,317 papers, followed by UK totaling 2,354 papers. Other leading countries in innovation research include Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Australia and Italy.