Nanoscience and nanotecnology on the balance

Abstract

A number of advantages of nanostmctured materials over bulk materials and their potential applications in many scientific and technological fields have been revealed in recent years. To find out the main growth and trends of this exciting new science and technology felds the growth rate of the nano-prefixed terms in the title of journal papers has been measured. It has been shown that the investigations dealing with graphite nanotubes represent kinetically the most active field of research in the nanosciences.Nanoscience and -technology deal with materials and structures having dimensions that mesure up to billionth of a meter (nanometer). A multitude of basic properties of materials are defined by length scales in the range of 10 to 200 Angstroms. When a solid is produced in a way that at least one of its dimensions is smaller than the length scale of some property, that property gets "confined" and will depend on the size and shape of what is called a "quantum crystal". At nanoscale one enters a world where physics and chemistry meet and novel properties of matter develop. 1,2 Based on these properties, a universe emerges, the characteristics of which can be applied to a full range of other disciplines including technologies that can, e.g., manipulate individual atoms with tiny probe elements.Visionaries 3 are seeing, in addition to the birth of a new nanoscience of materials with revolutionary electrical, optical, magnetic, etc., properties, the coming of age of technologies for making molecular engines and robots which like cells could populate nanofactories or could make copies of themselves.One way of monitor the emergence of new fields is to peruse the many papers and reviews published on the topic. A more simple and perhaps more enlightening approach

Nanoscience and technology publications and patents: a review of social science studies and search strategies

“…Mogoutov and Kahane (2007) claimed that the core of related keywords will experience an even more rapid growth than the entire database of nanotechnology publications. Early bibliometric analysis by, for instance, Braun et al (1997) and Tolles (2001), which harvested publications through respective nano-prefixed keywords, or merely the simple term ''nano*'', suffered from the omission of biotechnology-related publications whose keywords were less likely to contain the prefix ''nano''. Another criticism of the lexical query approach is its subjectivity when using experts to define the keyword set used.…”

Multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and patterns of research collaboration in nanoscience and nanotechnology

“…Following up the study of BRAUN et al (1997), this section briefly describes the growth of the occurrence of the prefix "nano" in titles of scientific papers of various disciplines from 1995 to early 2003. Table 1 illustrates some of the most frequently used "nano-terms".…”

“…The US National Science and Technology Council promises (NSTC, 2000): "The effect of nanotechnology on the health, wealth, and lives of people could be at least as significant as the combined influences of microelectronics, medical imaging, computer-aided engineering, and man-made polymers developed in this century." Compared to the early period analyzed by BRAUN et al (1997), nanoscale research has become increasingly driven by science policy.…”

Diffusion of nanotechnology knowledge in Turkey and its network structure

“…It involves physics, chemistry, medicine, and biotechnology, among others, and promises a great deal of innovation for, and benefit to, society as a whole. Brown, Schubert and Zsindely (1997) studied the growth of terms with the prefix "nano" in the titles of journal papers published between 1986 and 1995. They identified more than 200 different such terms and calculated the exponential doubling time as 1.6 years (p. 322).…”