The Structure and Infrastructure of the Global Nanotechnology Literature

Abstract

Public reporting burden for the collection of information is estimated to average 1 hour per response, including the time for reviewing instructions, searching existing data sources, gathering and maintaining the data needed, and completing and reviewing the collection of information. Records from the Science Citation Index/ Social Science Citation Index (SCI) were analyzed to provide the infrastructure of the global nanotechnology literature (prolific authors/ journals/ institutions/ countries, most cited authors/ papers/ journals) and the thematic structure (taxonomy) of the global nanotechnology literature, from a science perspective. Records from the Engineering Compendex (EC) were analyzed to provide a taxonomy from a technology perspective.• The Far Eastern countries have expanded nanotechnology publication output dramatically in the past decade.• The Peoples Republic of China ranks second to the USA (2004 results) in nanotechnology papers published in the Science Citation Index, and has increased its nanotechnology publication output by a factor of 21 in a decade.• Of the six most prolific (publications) countries in nanotechnology, the three from the Western group (USA, Germany, France) have about eight percent more publications (for 2004) than the three from the Far Eastern group (China, Japan, South Korea).• While most of the high nanotechnology publication-producing countries are also high nanotechnology patent producers in the US Patent Office (as of 2003), China is a major exception. China ranks 20th as a nanotechnology patent-producing country in the US Patent Office.

Regional development and interregional collaboration in the growth of nanotechnology research in China

“…These findings about China's remarkable growth in nanotechnology publication output, particularly since 2000, are similar to those reported by other studies that have compared Chinese nanotechnology research activity with that of other countries (see, for example, Guan and Ma 2007;Kostoff et al 2006Kostoff et al , 2007bYoutie et al 2008;Zhou and Leydesdorff 2006). The citation quality of Chinese nanotechnology publications still lags that of the US and leading European countries, but this gap in citation quality has narrowed in recent years ).…”

“…Between 2007, Chinese governmental spending on nanotechnology R&D was estimated to be comparable (on a Purchasing Power Parity basis) to that of US federal government (Cientifica 2009). China is now the world's second largest contributor of scientific publications worldwide in the nanotechnology domain (Kostoff et al 2006(Kostoff et al , 2007aZhou and Leydesdorff 2006), the citation quality of Chinese nanotechnology publications is rising , and Chinese researchers are making noticeable inroads in both authorship and editorial roles in leading nanotechnology journals (Braun et al 2007). …”

Visualizing nanotechnology research in Canada: evidence from publication activities, 1990–2009

“…Built on the nanotechnology search strategies of previous research (Kostoff et al 2006;Zhou and Leydesdorff 2006;Heinze et al 2007), a two-stage composite Boolean search strategy validated by nano scientists was developed by Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy (STIP) researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The strategy was applied to the Web of Science: Science Citation Index Expanded (WoS-SCI), the most recognized publication dataset in scientifically-minded academia, and global publications of nano research from 1990 to 2009, inclusive, were downloaded in December 2009.…”

Current trends in nanotechnology research across worldwide geo-economic players

“…Moreover keywords do not refer necessarily to a specific research field, making such an analysis less 1 The literature is vast and not fully cited here, but a good list of references is found in Kostoff et al (2006Kostoff et al ( , 2007a; Shapira and Youtie (2008); Huang et al (2011). 2 http://info.scopus.com/about/ (accessed March 11, 2011); See also http://info.scopus.com/why-scopus/ academia/ (accessed June 18, 2010).…”