Development of a software for metric studies of transportation engineering journals

This study intends to describe the development and results of a software designed to analyze millions of articles in the area of Transportation Engineering. This tool intends to support Transportation Planning activities by providing additional information about trends, references and technologies. In order to develop this software, techniques from scientometrics, bibliometrics and informetrics were employed with the support of tools from Computer Science, such as Artificial Intelligence, Data Mining and Natural Language Processing. The result of this study is a structured database that allows browsing the change of interest in different topics along the years in areas related to Transportation Engineering. When analyzing a given area, the database is capable of identifying which authors published works in that area, allowing the identification of specialists and related papers. In addition, the software responsible for creating this database is capable of performing the same analysis in academic corpora of other areas of study.