Footprints in the scientific landscape - comparing metamaterials and fullerenes

Citations to scientific publications can be considered "frozen footprints" which "bear witness to the passage of ideas" (Cronin, 1984). With this in mind we employ a so-called genesisarticle, a paper that first described a scientific or technological topic. This we use as a standard reference to examine the traces it has left in the world of publications. The footprintanalysis derives its name from this approach. In this poster contribution we present a complete profiling of two distinct topics (metamaterials and fullerenes) by applying and expanding approaches we introduced previously (Jovanovic, 2007; Jovanovic et al., 2009). Furthermore we compare the profiles of the considered topics and look for typical patterns of the trajectories in the publication landscape.