Detecting and predicting thematic areas evolution of R&D and Innovation research

The literature dealing with the intersection between Research and Development (R&D) and Innovation is characterized by a huge number of scientific studies. In our opinion, there is the need to provide an overview of the main themes investigated. This could serve to highlight both outdated and emerging themes. Through a systematic review of the literature based on text mining methods on the topic “R&D and Innovation”, we identified seven significant clusters of research papers and articles in objectively justifiable patterns and sets that make possible the understanding of thematic areas evolution, that can be useful for the definition of future research avenues. We believe that our results are important for developing new streams of research and are useful not only for experienced scholars, but also for PhD students. They allow the possibility to figure out the evolution of thematic areas dealing with this topic, which implicitly leads to highlight the hottest ones in recent years, without traditional biases characterizing manual systematic reviews.