The evolution of the most important research topics in organic and perovskite solar cell research from 2008 to 2017: A bibliometric literature review using bibliographic coupling analysis

Abstract Document bibliographic coupling analysis was applied to a dataset of 23,953 journal papers in order to provide an overview of topics that were present in the academic literature on organic solar cells (OSCs) and perovskite solar cells (PvSCs) during the period of 2008–2017. Ten yearly networks were constructed by linking documents based on shared references, and clusters of closely connected papers were identified as the representations of topics in OSC and PvSC research. Next, 1,437 document titles were read in order to label the 80 most relevant clusters, together containing 11,352 papers. The resulting cluster labels show that research focused on bulk heterojunction polymer/fullerene solar cells in the beginning of the studied period, that OSC material development topics became more important in the middle of the decade, and that continued efforts to improve power conversion efficiencies spurred the rise of new concepts like PvSCs, fullerene-free OSCs, and ternary OSCs in the later years. While traditional literature reviews are valuable for in-depth reviews of specific topics, bibliometric reviews based on document bibliographic coupling are better suited for broad research synthesis. By leveraging the relationships present within the body of literature, they can objectively present the topic structure of large research domains.