Searching for theoretical concepts in a specific scientific discipline: an approach based on terminological flows

Tribology is a very interdisciplinary field. Tribology, lubrication and surface technology are key technologies and with utmost importance for all branches in industrial production. Innovations in these technologies require the best possible fundamental understanding of the complex processes taking place at the interfaces of a tribological system. Therefore the XTribology centre in AC2T Research GmbH is confronted with the challenges of a highly interdisciplinary field. In previous works, we developed an approach based on the analysis of the evolution of a specific scientific discipline by means of studying its terminology extracted from related specialized international literature. In this work we investigate the very important subfield of Tribology "the mechanism of wear". The scientific basis is still explored. Besides general bibliometric aspects the "theories" and its connection to experiments are of specific interest.