Road transport electrification – publication analysis

This report summarizes the results of a study of scientific publications within vehicle electrification, i.e. battery, hybrid and/or fuel cell electric vehicles including the recharg-ing or refuelling infrastructure. A new method was developed for the study, which extracts Scopus publications relating to vehicle electrification. Three enabling technolo-gies; batteries, fuel cells, and electric machines including power electronics, were studied separately, as such publications only to a small extent are captured when searching for publications mentioning automotive applications.

Results are given for the top 16 countries in terms of volume within vehicle electrification with special attention given to publications including Swedish (co-)authors. China is the dominating country and is still increasing its share. Sweden has a percentage of the world production between 0.8 – 1.4% and relatively low growth rate. On the other hand, the citation impact is high.

Among the enabling technologies, batteries show the highest growth rate, in Sweden as well as in the world. China is approaching a 50% share of all battery publications.

Other entities studied and discussed are institutions and authors and different dimen-sions including how international the research is and the share of academic-corporate co-publications.