Topic-linked innovation paths in science and technology

•Discovering topic-linked innovation evolution paths in science and technology.•Revealing patterns in the evolution of science knowledge into technological applications.•Multi-relationship fusion strengthens the semantic relevance of the topic terms.•Summarizing the relationship between science and technology.•Discovering possible new knowledge growth points. In the modern world, science and technology jointly determine the evolutionary path of scientific innovation, with an increasingly close relationship between them. Therefore, it is important to study the identification method of the innovation path, based on the linkage of topics in science and technology. This study focuses on connected topics utilizing bibliometric analysis, thereby exploring the identification method for innovation paths based on the linkage of scientific and technological topics. The internal mechanism of knowledge dissemination and the relationship between science and technology are revealed and described in detail by measuring the linkage of knowledge units. For practical bibliometric analyses, research papers and patent literature were used to characterize scientific research and technological research to reveal the innovation path for the interaction of science and technology quantitatively, automatically, and visually. Experimental study shows that analysis of the topic-linked path of science and technology, along with the integration of multi-relationships, can effectively identify important science- and technology-related topics in a field in the evolution process, and help grasp the key points of basic research and applied research.