birddog

The goal of birddog is sniffing out emergence and trajectories in scientific and patent literature.

Installation

Install the stable version from CRAN:

install.packages("birddog")
library(birddog)

Or the development version from GitHub:

# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("roneyfraga/birddog")
library(birddog)

Features

Data import

• read_openalex() – OpenAlex API or CSV exports
• read_wos() – Web of Science BibTeX, RIS, plain-text, tab-delimited

Citation network and community detection

• sniff_network() – direct citation or bibliographic coupling networks
• sniff_components() – identify connected components
• sniff_groups() – community detection (fast greedy, Louvain, Leiden, walktrap, edge betweenness)

Group analysis

• sniff_groups_attributes() – group-level summary statistics and horizon plots
• sniff_groups_keywords() – keyword frequency per group
• sniff_groups_terms() – NLP-based phrase extraction
• sniff_groups_hubs() – hub classification (Zi-Pi, Guimera and Amaral 2005)
• sniff_groups_cumulative_citations() – per-document citation growth

Indexes

• sniff_citations_cycle_time() – measures the pace of change (Kayal 1999)
• sniff_entropy() – normalized Shannon entropy for keyword diversity (Shannon 1948; Pielou 1966)

Trajectories

• sniff_groups_cumulative() – cumulative clusterization over time
• sniff_groups_trajectories() – Jaccard similarity DAG across years
• plot_group_trajectories_2d() / plot_group_trajectories_3d() – node-based trajectory plots
• detect_main_trajectories() – top-N disjoint paths via dynamic programming
• filter_trajectories() – filter and rank detected trajectories
• plot_group_trajectories_lines_2d() / plot_group_trajectories_lines_3d() – variable-width line plots

Main path analysis

• sniff_key_route() – key-route search (Liu and Lu 2012) with SPC weights

Topic modeling

• sniff_groups_stm_prepare() / sniff_groups_stm_run() – structural topic modeling within groups

Vignettes

The vignettes are available online here:

• https://roneyfraga.com/birddog/articles/introduction_birddog.html
• Interactive presentation (biogas)

Methodological workflow

Main publications

• Miranda et al. (2025) The Landscape of Green and Biohydrogen Technology: A Data-Driven Exploration Using Non-Supervised Methods
• Felizardo et al. (2025) Transforming Wastes into Resources: Innovations in Cotton Biorefineries for a Sustainable Future
• Biazatti et al. (2024) Soybean biorefinery and technological forecasts based on a bibliometric analysis and network mapping
• Maria et al. (2023) Evolution of Green Finance: A Bibliometric Analysis through Complex Networks and Machine Learning
• Matos et al. (2023) Building and evaluating prospective scenarios for corn-based biorefineries
• Souza et al. (2022) Is entrepreneurship an emerging area of research? A computational response
• Souza et al. (2022) Bioenergy research in Brazil: A bibliometric evaluation of the BIOEN Research Program