You can use your knowledge and intuition to predict the future, or you can use more or less elaborate methodologies, ideally you can fall back on the opinion of others with more of that knowledge and intuition. And now you can also use new AI tools or at least check what they have to say.
The linked paper is about predicting scientific research trends over time, and it presents a tool based on language models to do it. The model is trained with a number of indicators of popularity over the years, such as number of publications, reviews, patents, and others. It uses Pubmed so the topics are restricted to life sciences. In any case, it is always useful to keep an eye on research trends and forecasting opinions.
So I tried the AI tool and the results are overall difficult to trust, but interesting. Predictions appear to have strong anomalies in some cases. The tool seems to be good at extending trends that have been stable for the last few years, and misses trends that have had a serious change in the last year or couple of years. All pretty reasonable for now, and probably will be improved quickly with iterations of these AI models.
Still, the tool is useful to visualise information about current and past popularity of a topic, and how it compares to other topics. These below are examples of the plots the tool produces:
Andrés Alba-Pérez 