A data set comprising close to 9000 scientific publications and patents published in the past 20 years has been evaluated by using specialized software (AnaVist by STN). Data like author, corporate source (university or company name), year, country and language of publication, concepts mentioned in the text, technology indicators assigned to the publication, etc. can be analyzed by using this software. Research trends such as the number of open literature and patent publications by different publishers and authors, hot and disappearing topics, topical areas of different industrial and academic institutions etc. have been evaluated in this way. The goal of this evaluation was to assess if the interest of industrial and academic research institutions for the area of catalysis by sulfides is growing, stable or declining. In addition to that, the qualitative evaluation of the present data set is also an example of how a large set of literature references can be dealt with. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.