Profile and trends in FTA approaches: a bibliometric analysis of special issues of international journals from four FTA conferences

The aim of this paper is to present the profile and trends of the academic discipline of Future-oriented Technology Assessment (FTA) and its approaches. As such the paper contributes to the discussion on the concept and positioning of FTA. The paper is based on bibliometric analyses of the special issues of five international journals published after the FTA conferences in 2004, 2006, 2008 and 2011: TFSC, Fu-tures, TASM, SSP and Foresight. Methodologically the paper draws on the facilities of Elsevier’s Scopus and Thompson Reuter’s Web of Science. The paper concludes that the field of FTA or foresight seems to be remarkable stable over the latest decade. As an academic field FTA has focussed its publications in a small number of journals, and that helps define and focus the field further. Finally, the paper concludes, that special issue publications resulting from the FTA conferences have the same level of quality and impact as articles published in ordinary issues of these journals.