Scientific frontiers represent the state of the art of scientific inquiries and the most active areas of research engaged by the scientific community. Developing a timely and adequate understanding of scientific frontiers has profound implications on our society as well as scientists and researchers. The complexity of a scientific inquiry alone makes it one of the most challenging and cognitively demanding tasks, even to experienced researchers and analysts. The goal of this Research Topic is to explore the potential of synergizing the development and dissemination of resources, tools, and benchmarks and identifying missing links and gaps that should be bridged in order to enable a more efficient and effective understanding of science.

We are seeking contributions relevant to this Research Topic in a broad context. For example, we welcome contributions that address the development of resources that analysts could leverage in their studies of scientific frontiers, ranging from metadata of scholarly publications, full text, domain ontologies, and usage data. We are also seeking contributions that introduce tools and techniques for visualizing, modeling, and making sense of scientific frontiers at various levels of granularity. Contributions on benchmarks, gold standards, and other evaluative metrics of the quality of a resource and the performance of a research tool are also relevant.

Keywords: benchmarks, mapping science, resources, research tools, visual analytic tools, bibliometric software, scientometric software, domain analysis systems, applications

Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be in line with the scope of the specialty and field to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Manuscripts discovered during any stage of peer review to be outside of the scope may be transferred to a suitable section or field, or withdrawn from review.