Nanotechnologies Output, Impact and Collaboration...search query that utilizes key concepts...

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Nanotechnologies Output, Impact and Collaboration A comparative analysis of France and other countries

Transcript of Nanotechnologies Output, Impact and Collaboration...search query that utilizes key concepts...

Page 1: Nanotechnologies Output, Impact and Collaboration...search query that utilizes key concepts extracted from a sample of relevant journals using a semantic technology called Elsevier

Nanotechnologies

Output, Impact and

Collaboration

A comparative analysis of France and other

countries

Page 2: Nanotechnologies Output, Impact and Collaboration...search query that utilizes key concepts extracted from a sample of relevant journals using a semantic technology called Elsevier

2

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CONTENTS 3

Executive summary

Nanotechnologies are a key enabling technology with a broad spectrum of applications

in several different fields and are one of the top research priorities at the European level

and in France as well.

This report provides an overview of the research activities on nanotechnologies using a

document set of +428,000 papers published in the period 2010 – 2014, collected by a

search query that utilizes key concepts extracted from a sample of relevant journals

using a semantic technology called Elsevier Fingerprint Engine. The analysis is carried

out on production, quality and collaboration.

Nanotechnologies are one of the fastest growing areas of research worldwide, with an

average growth rate close to 11% year-over-year for the past 5 years. Growth is driven

mainly by China and India while the US and the European countries struggle in keeping

up with the global pace.

Nanotechnology is also a highly competitive field, with a citation impact almost 70%

higher than the world average. While the US still leads the group of comparator countries

from the point of view of citation impact, China has surpassed Germany and bridged the

gap with UK, while Iran has surpassed France and reached Italy.

European countries have a strong propensity for international collaboration, with about

half of their papers showing co-authors from different countries; China, India and Iran on

the other hand have 40 to 50% of their outputs resulting from institutional collaboration.

US, Japan and South Korea have a more balanced ratio of institutional and international

collaborations.

Impact doesn’t seem to be strongly correlated to the types of collaborations, with

countries that benefit from international partnerships, like the UK, and others, such as

France, which do not gain citation impact proportionally to their internationalization

efforts.

Overall, this analysis confirms that nanotechnologies are an extremely competitive field,

where the leadership of the US and EU is challenged by countries in Asia that are

investing heavily in this area and see not only their output but also the impact of their

research growing steadily. It will be worthwhile to analyse in the coming years if the

availability of dedicated funds through the H2020 programs will result in European

countries being able to maintain a position of scientific leadership in this field which has

an enormous potential to be translated into innovation and eventually economic

development.

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CONTENTS 4

Contents

Contents 4

1 Case study: Nanotechnologies 5

1.1 Introduction 6 1.2 Overview of the dataset 7 1.3 Key Findings 10 1.4 Output 11 1.5 Citation Impact 13 1.6 Collaboration 17

APPENDIX A: Methodology and data for the case study on Nanotechnologies 20

APPENDIX B: Semantic Fingerprinting 22

APPENDIX C: List of nanotechnology related journals used to select the keywords 23

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CASE STUDY: NANOTECHNOLOGIES 5

Case study:

Nanotechnologies

We investigate the performance of France in the field of Nanotechnologies. The analysis is

based on a multidisciplinary corpus of publications selected through relevant keywords.

We focus on the number of publications, the citation impact, the collaborations and their

influence on production and impact for France and selected countries among the most

active in the field.

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CASE STUDY: NANOTECHNOLOGIES 6

1.1 Introduction

Nanotechnologies, with their application to a broad range of challenges (such as

environmental issues, sustainable energies, food safety, advanced materials and

medicine) have been selected by the European Commission as one of the Key Enabling

Technologies (KETs) that will allow European industries to retain competitiveness and

capitalise on new markets1. To support research and development efforts on KETs -

and Nanotechnologies in particular - dedicated funding programs such as the

Leadership in Enabling and Industrial Technologies (LEIT) have been created within

Horizon 20202, which follow up on previous funding streams in the Framework

Programmes 6 and 7. Likewise, In France, nanotechnologies are definitely at the heart

of several of the Défis of the Stratégie nationale de la recherche3.

In this study we focus on the scientific output in the field of Nanotechnologies in the

years from 2010 to 2014 included. In order to conduct an analysis as accurate and

comprehensive as possible, a corpus of publications has been assembled with a

bottom-up approach, by selecting documents based on relevant keywords. The

resulting dataset has been used to model two research areas: one including all

publications, the other limited to publications with at least one author from a French

institution. A detailed description of the methodology is available in Appendix A.

After having qualified the dataset in terms of its content and coverage, the analysis will

cover the dimensions of

Output

Citation impact

Collaboration

Research trends

1 See http://ec.europa.eu/growth/industry/key-enabling-technologies/index_en.htm

2 See http://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/en/h2020-section/nanotechnologies

3 See http://cache.media.enseignementsup-recherche.gouv.fr/file/Strategie_Recherche/69/3/rapport_SNR_397693.pdf

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CASE STUDY: NANOTECHNOLOGIES 7

1.2 Overview of the dataset

The dataset contains 428,895 publications published between 2010 and 2014, which

corresponds to about 3.3% of the total scientific output recorded by Scopus in the same

period. The pie chart below shows the distribution of subject areas represented in the

dataset, based on the classification of the journals in which the papers in this dataset

have been published.

Figure 0.1— Breakdown of Nanotechnologies by subject area, 2010 – 2014.

Source: SciVal.com, last updated 27 July 2015

The same chart applied to the subset of publications featuring at least one French

institution shows a similar distribution, but with a higher share of Physics and a lower

one of Engineering.

Figure 0.2— Breakdown of Nanotechnologies by subject area, 2010 – 2014.

Publications with at least one French institution. Source: SciVal.com, last updated

27 July 2015

The top journals appearing in this research area, by number of publications, are listed in

the table below, both for all publications and for France only. The journals that are

unique to each list are highlighted in yellow.

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CASE STUDY: NANOTECHNOLOGIES 8

Table 0.3— Top journals by number of publications, Nanotechnologies, World, 2010

- 2014. Source: SciVal.com, last updated 27 July 2015

Journal Number of publications

Journal of Physical Chemistry C 7645

Advanced Materials Research 6487

Applied Physics Letters 6287

Physical Review B - Condensed Matter and Materials

Physics

5443

RSC Advances 5069

Journal of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology 4801

ACS Nano 4788

Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical

Engineering

4753

Journal of Applied Physics 4745

Langmuir 4520

Nanoscale 4330

Nano Letters 4007

Nanotechnology 3990

ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces 3742

Journal of Materials Chemistry 3709

Materials Letters 3606

Applied Surface Science 3578

Chemical Communications 3435

Electrochimica Acta 3241

Carbon 2923

Table 0.4— Top journals by number of publications, Nanotechnologies, France,

2010 - 2014. Source: SciVal.com, last updated 27 July 2015

Journal Number of publications

Physical Review B - Condensed Matter and Materials

Physics

600

Journal of Physical Chemistry C 502

Applied Physics Letters 425

Langmuir 358

Journal of Applied Physics 327

Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical

Engineering

310

Nanotechnology 243

ACS Nano 218

Physical Review Letters 216

Nano Letters 206

Carbon 176

Nanoscale 173

Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics 163

Chemical Communications 145

Journal of Physics: Conference Series 144

Journal of Materials Chemistry 135

Soft Matter 134

Materials Research Society Symposium - Proceedings 128

Journal of Nanoparticle Research 125

RSC Advances 119

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CASE STUDY: NANOTECHNOLOGIES 9

The most frequent concepts featured in the research area are represented in the word

clouds below, where the size of the label is proportional to the frequency with which it

appears in the documents and its colour takes into account the growth trend. The first

one includes all the publications in the research area, the second one only those with at

least one French institution in the authors’ affiliations.

Figure 0.5— Top 50 concepts in Nanotechnologies, World, 2010 - 2014.

Source: SciVal.com, last updated 27 July 2015

Figure 0.6— Top 50 concepts in Nanotechnologies, France, 2010 - 2014.

Source: SciVal.com, last updated 27 July 2015

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CASE STUDY: NANOTECHNOLOGIES 10

1.3 Key Findings

FRANCE’S WORLD ARTICLE SHARE

-5.9% Research in nanotechnologies grows 4 times faster than the

world average across all fields. With an average growth of 4.4%,

France, like the US and other European countries) has been

losing output share over the past 5 years.

FRANCE FIELD-WEIGHTED CITATION IMPACT

1.67 Articles in nanotechnologies receive on average 68% more

citations than the global average across all fields, years and

document types. In such a competitive research area, France is

keeping the pace with the world average citation impact, but has

been surpassed by Iran and scores below other European

countries such as Italy, Germany and the UK.

OUTPUT

Nanotechnologies are one of the fastest growing areas of research worldwide, with an average growth rate close to 11% year-over-year

for the past 5 years. Growth is driven mainly by China and India while the US and the European countries struggle in keeping up with

the global pace.

IMPACT

Nanotechnology is a highly competitive field, with a citation impact almost 70% higher than the world average. While the US still leads

the group of comparator countries from the point of view of citation impact, China has surpassed Germany and bridged the gap with UK,

while Iran has surpassed France and reached Italy.

COLLABORATION

European countries have a strong propensity for international collaboration, with about half of their papers showing co-authors from

different countries; China, India and Iran on the other hand have 40 to 50% of their outputs resulting from institutional collaboration. US,

Japan and South Korea have a more balanced ratio of institutional and international collaborations.

Impact doesn’t seem to be strongly correlated to the types of collaborations, with countries that benefit from international partnerships,

like the UK, and others, such as France, which do not gain citation impact proportionally to their internationalization efforts.

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CASE STUDY: NANOTECHNOLOGIES 11

1.4 Output

1.4.1 Research output in Nanotechnologies is growing faster than

world’s average across fields

In the period from 2010 to 2014 the overall production in Nanotechnologies has reached

a total of 428,895 publications, with a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of

10.95%, which is 4 times faster than the world’s average across all fields in the same

period (2.7%).

Figure 0.8 shows the top 10 countries in the field by scholarly output: China is the

largest contributor, followed by the United States, while the remaining 8 countries are

much closer to each other and well below the production of the first two.

1.4.2 World article share is the highest for China while Europe and

US share is declining

In terms of share and share growth, the combined effect of the strong output size and

growth of China and, to a lesser extent, India and Iran, results in a decline of

publications share of European countries and United States, as shown in Figure 0.9.

This means that the overall growth in the field, observed in Figure 0.7, is driven by

developing countries.

France has grown on average by 4.4% over the past five years, meaning that its overall

share has declined by 6%; the same trend is shown by other European countries such

as Germany, the UK and, to a lesser extent, Italy.

Figure 0.7— Number of publications, World and France, Nanotechnologies, 2010 –

2014.

Source: SciVal.com, last updated 27 July 2015

Figure 0.8— Overall number of articles and Compound Annual Growth Rate

(CAGR) for the top 10 contributing countries, Nanotechnologies, 2010 - 2014.

Source: SciVal.com, last updated 27 July 2015

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CASE STUDY: NANOTECHNOLOGIES 12

Figure 0.9— Overall share of articles and Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR)

for the top 10 contributing countries, Nanotechnologies, 2010 - 2014. Source:

SciVal.com, last updated 27 July 2015

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CASE STUDY: NANOTECHNOLOGIES 13

1.5 Citation Impact

1.5.1 Global citation share is the highest for China and declining for

US and Europe

The number of citations received by an article from subsequently-published articles is

widely recognized as a proxy of the quality or importance of the reported research4.

As Figure 0.10 shows, a similar pattern can be observed between the share of

publications per country and the share of citations: if we look at the top two countries,

we see China surpassing the United States in publications share in 2011 and the same

happening with citations share in 2012, where the time difference can be explained by

the dynamics of citations, which are accrued by articles after they have been published.

France, Germany and the UK show a decline in citation share which is in line with the

trend in output share, while Italy is less affected by the decline.

Figure 0.10— Overall share of citations for the top 10 contributing countries,

Nanotechnologies, 2010 - 2014. Right-hand panel excludes China and the US for

clarity. Source: SciVal.com, last updated 27 July 2015

1.5.2 The global citation impact of Nanotechnologies articles is much

higher than the world’s average across all fields

While citations provide an intuitive way to measure research impact, they are not

comparable across different fields, publication years and document types (articles,

reviews, conference papers, etc.). A more sophisticated way of measuring scientific

impact is to use field-weighted citation impact (FWCI). FWCI normalizes the differences

in citations due to the subject field, publication year and document type. The world is

indexed to an FWCI value of 1.00. An FWCI of more than 1.00 indicates that the entity’s

publications have been cited more often than expected based on the global average for

similar publications.

Table 0.11 shows the overall FWCI of the document set representing nanotechnologies

research. While the global value has decreased from 2010 to 2014, nanotechnology

remains a research area with high global impact, receiving 68% more citations than the

global average.

4 Davis, P.M. (2009) “Reward or persuasion? The battle to define the meaning of a citation” Learned

Publishing 22 (1) pp. 5-11.

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CASE STUDY: NANOTECHNOLOGIES 14

Table 0.11— FWCI for top 10 contributing countries and world, Nanotechnologies,

2010 - 2014. Source: SciVal.com, last updated 27 July 2015

2010 2011 2012 2013 2014

China 1,76 1,82 1,87 1,86 1,87

United States 2,46 2,26 2,24 2,19 2,15

India 1,52 1,31 1,36 1,31 1,34

South Korea 1,85 1,89 1,85 1,89 1,76

Germany 2,08 1,96 1,92 1,75 1,71

Japan 1,6 1,55 1,53 1,4 1,51

France 1,82 1,79 1,66 1,6 1,52

Iran 1,45 1,38 1,3 1,38 1,72

United Kingdom 2,18 2,02 2,02 2,04 1,89

Italy 1,93 1,88 1,83 1,76 1,71

World 1,77 1,71 1,69 1,64 1,63

The high impact of nanotechnologies, combined with the strong growth in production,

poses significant challenges to countries who try to remain competitive in this field. By

rebasing the FWCI to the world’s value it becomes easier to compare countries among

themselves and with the global average. This is represented in Figure 0.12.

Figure 0.12— Rebased field-weighted citation impact (FWCI) for the top 10

contributing countries, Nanotechnologies, 2010 - 2014. Source: SciVal.com, last

updated 27 July 2015

The rebased FWCI indicates that the US and UK still have the highest average impact

in this field, but countries such as China and Iran are rapidly improving. Among the

other European countries, Italy and Germany are still above the world’s average,

although the latter shows an important decline, while France in the last three years has

performed below world’s average and scores consistently below the other EU countries

in the comparator group.

1.5.3 Highly cited articles in Nanotechnologies are almost twice more

frequent than in other fields

The distribution of citations among articles is known to be strongly skewed, with a small

number of articles receiving the majority of the citations5 and a long tail of articles with

5 De Solla Price, D. J. (1965) “Networks of scientific papers,” Science. 149: 510–515. doi:

10.1126/science.149.3683.510.

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CASE STUDY: NANOTECHNOLOGIES 15

few or no citations at all. Therefore it is meaningful to combine FWCI, which is an

average, with another metric that focuses on the subset of highly cited articles, meaning

those articles that rank in the top 1% and 10% of the most cited articles by publication

year and subject area.

If we assumed that citations in nanotechnologies articles follow the same distribution as

all other articles, it would be reasonable to expect that roughly1% of the articles in the

document set fall in the top 1% most cited articles and likewise for the 10% threshold. If

the share is higher for nanotechnologies, this means that articles in this field tend to

accumulate on the higher band of the citation spectrum. Figure 0.13 shows the trend of

highly cited articles in nanotechnologies from 2010 to 2014. 2.4% of the articles

published in Nanotechnologies in 2010 belong to the top 1% most cited articles

worldwide for the same year, whereas 19% of them belong to the top 10%. These

shares are consistently much higher than the corresponding thresholds for all years

considered, although the trend shows a decline that is similar to the trend for the field-

weighted citation impact.

Figure 0.13— Articles with citation counts in the top 1st and 10

th percentile,

Nanotechnologies, World, 2010 - 2014. Source: SciVal.com, last updated 27 July

2015

If we look at the distribution of articles in the top 1st percentile by country, we see that

the US and UK are still leading the group of comparator countries, but the share has

been reduced, especially for the US which have gone from 4.6% in 2010 to 2.6% in

2014. Likewise, Germany has seen his share cut by almost 50%, going from 3.0% to

1.6%; on the other hand Iran is the only country among the top 10 with an opposite

trend, having increased its share from 1.0% to 1.8%.

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CASE STUDY: NANOTECHNOLOGIES 16

Figure 0.14— Distribution of articles with citation counts in the top 1st percentile by

country, Nanotechnologies, 2010 and 2014. Source: SciVal.com, last updated 27

July 2015

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CASE STUDY: NANOTECHNOLOGIES 17

1.6 Collaboration

It is a known fact that researchers are increasingly collaborating with international

partners6 and that this type of collaboration yields higher impact

7. One way to measure

collaboration is by looking at co-authorship relationships in publications, which can be

classified as international, national, institutional and single authorship (see Table 0.15

for the definitions).

Table 0.15— Definitions of different geographic collaborations, based on co-authorship

Type of

collaboration

Definition

International Multi-authored research outputs where authors are affiliated with

institutions in at least two

different countries

National Multi-authored research outputs where authors are affiliated with

institutions in more than one institution but within the same country

Institutional Multi-authored research outputs where all authors are affiliated with

the same institution

Single Author Single-authored research outputs

The distribution of articles by collaboration type for the field of Nanotechnologies is

represented in Figure 0.16.

Figure 0.16— Distribution of articles by collaboration type, Nanotechnologies, 2010

-2014. Source: SciVal.com, last updated 27 July 2015

It is striking that every year half of the articles result from institutional collaborations and

that national and international collaborations are approximately equal, while it is

6 Pan, R. K., Kaski, K., and Fortunato, S. (2012) "World citation and collaboration networks: uncovering the

role of geography in science," Scientific Reports. 2: 902. Retrieved online from:

http://www.nature.com/srep/2012/121129/srep00902/full/srep00902.html.

7 Science Europe and Elsevier. (2013) "Comparative Benchmarking of European and US Research

Collaboration and Researcher Mobility," Retrieved online from: http://www.scienceeurope.org/uploads/Public

documents and speeches/SE and Elsevier Report Final.pdf; The Royal Society. (2011) "Knowledge,

Networks and Nations: Global Scientific Collaboration in the 21st Century," (J. Wilson, et al, Eds.) London:

The Royal Society. p. 113. Retrieved online from: http://royalsociety.org/policy/projects/knowledge-networks-

nations/report/.

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CASE STUDY: NANOTECHNOLOGIES 18

somewhat expected that publications with a single author are a small fraction of the

total. It is worth exploring the collaboration patterns for the top 10 contributing countries,

to see whether patterns emerge that may explain the aggregated figures.

Figure 0.17— Distribution of articles by collaboration type and country,

Nanotechnologies, 2009 -2014. Source: SciVal.com, last updated 27 July 2015

European countries, France and the UK in particular, have a high share of international

collaborations, while US, South Korea and Japan have comparable proportions of

institutional and international collaborations, although the latter are growing in all three

countries. China, India and Iran, on the other hand, show a remarkably higher share of

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CASE STUDY: NANOTECHNOLOGIES 19

institutional collaborations, which, combined with their high share of outputs, explains

the aggregated figures seen above. While for certain countries international

collaboration seems to reflect on scientific impact, this is not so evident for France.

While it has the second largest value for international collaboration among the

comparator countries, its performance is below the world’s average citation impact, as

shown in Figure 0.18.

Figure 0.18— Field-weighted citation impact (FWCI) vs. share of international

collaborations by country. The FWCI value is normalized to the world average in

Nanotechnologies. 2010 -2014. Source: SciVal.com, last updated 27 July 2015

While the complex nature of research collaborations cannot be fully captured by

statistics alone, it would be worthwhile to analyse in more detail the existing

collaborations of French institutions in nanotechnology research projects to have a

better understanding, especially taking into account the long-standing tradition of

France as an international research partner.

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APPENDIX A 20

Methodology and rationale

Nanotechnologies, like other research fields having a broad

spectrum of applications in different domains, pose interesting

challenges in their definition, because the traditional top-down

classification schemes, based on journals, may overlook

significant contributions, like for example the publications from

the multidisciplinary journals (such as Nature, Science, and

others). Therefore, a bottom-up, publication-based approach is

the preferred approach in such cases. Papers are selected with

a keywords-based search, where a set of selected keywords

defines the field of interest and filters on publication years,

countries, etc. can be applied at a later stage. The search query

and additional filters are used in SciVal to create a Research

Area that constitutes the entity to which all subsequent analyses

are applied. The methodology to create the keywords based

search query consists of three steps.

Step 1: Creation of a reference corpus for the

identification of key concepts in

Nanotechnologies

A list of 101 journals devoted to the dissemination of

nanotechnologies and indexed in the Scopus database has been

used as a starting point; this list is available in Appendix C. Of all

the documents included in those journals, only those published

in the years 2005 – 2015 have been considered, besides only

papers with at least one author from a French institution have

been included, to emphasize the research areas that are of

particular importance for this country. This has led to a set of

3737 publications on which the semantic analysis has been

performed to extract key weighted concepts.

Step 2: Extraction and ranking of key concepts

and terms using semantic fingerprints

Using the semantic Elsevier Fingerprint Engine (see Appendix B

), an array of weighted concepts – drawn from the Compendex8

thesaurus - has been extracted from each publication in the

corpus. The resulting aggregated set of concepts has then been

clustered into three groups, by applying a k-means clustering

algorithm9 which groups keywords with similar frequency and

8 See http://www.elsevier.com/solutions/engineering-village/content/compendex

9 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-means_clustering

aggregated weight, so that each cluster includes concepts with

similar importance in the definition of the research area.

Step 3: Selection of key concepts and creation

of the search query

For each cluster, a further selection has been done, discarding

concepts that are too generic (e.g. “Temperature”, “Models”,

“Materials”) and would lead to an increment in false positives

(i.e. documents that include those concepts but are not actually

relevant for nanotechnologies).

The selected concepts are listed in the following table.

Table 0.19— Key concepts selected to define

Nanotechnologies.

Nanoparticles Nanoelectronics

Nanowires Nanoscience

Carbon nanotubes Carbon nanotube field effect

transistors

Graphene Nanoindentation

Semiconductor quantum dots Nanoshells

Nanocrystals Nanocrystallites

Nanostructures Nanoprobes

Nanotubes Carbon nanofibers

Nanocomposites Nanosheets

Nanotechnology Magnetite nanoparticles

Nanostructured materials Nanoneedles

Single-walled carbon nanotubes

(SWCN)

Nanorings

Monolayers Nanolithography

Nanorods Nanosensors

Appendix A

Methodology and data for the case

study on Nanotechnologies

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APPENDIX A 21

Semiconductor quantum wells Nanobiotechnology

Nanoclusters Nanocomposite films

Nanoimprint lithography Nanocrystalline powders

Metal nanoparticles Nanocantilevers

Nanocapsules Nanoreactors

Medical nanotechnology Nanocrystallization

Nanoribbons Nanotransistors

Electron beam lithography Nanorobotics

Nanofibers Nanomagnetics

Multiwalled carbon nanotubes

(MWCN)

Nanotips

Nanophotonics Nanobelts

Nanodiamonds Nanohorns

Self assembled monolayers Nanocrystalline materials

Nanospheres Nanocrystalline silicon

NEMS Nanomechanics

Nanosystems Nanorobots

Nanofluidics Nanotribology

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APPENDIX B 22

A semantic fingerprint consists of all the key concepts derived

from a piece of text, weighted to reflect their relative importance.

The Elsevier Fingerprint Engine can be used to determine the

semantic fingerprint of any text, from grant applications to

publications. A number of thesauri spanning all major disciplines,

along with Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, are

applied to scan and analyze text; in this study, publications from

the Scopus database were scanned to identify and weight key

concepts and terms related to nanotechnologies research. The

Elsevier Fingerprint Engine assigns to each document a

collection of key representative concepts—its semantic

fingerprint.

The advantage of using key concepts based on semantic

fingerprint technology is that the resulting terms are of higher

quality and are more representative than standard sets of

keywords, which often contain duplicates, synonyms, and

inclusion of irrelevant terms. With the Elsevier Fingerprint

Engine, various NLP modules are applied to a text source,

enabling the computer to recognize and interpret complex text,

including idioms, hyphenations and abbreviations. The concept-

finding algorithm is sensitive to spelling variations such as case

sensitivity, stop words, normalization, and word ordering, but

ignores insignificant differences wherever these variations have

no meaning. Concept finding can be constrained by part-of-

speech requirements on terms (e.g., “lead” identified as a noun

or a verb) and also by immediate negated context (e.g., “non-

Hodgkin Lymphoma” must not be found as “Hodgkin

Lymphoma”).

Figure 0.1 shows an example of a semantic fingerprint based on

a published abstract. The Elsevier Fingerprint Engine generates

a graphical representation of the concepts and terms included in

the abstract, weighted by importance.

Semantic fingerprints can be used for describing themes and

identifying all articles in Scopus worldwide that are related to a

theme. Fingerprints are ideal for describing groups of articles

and identifying articles that are related to one another in terms of

subject area, such as nanotechnologies research. Fingerprints

can be aggregated at the department, institute, and country level

to examine research output, emerging research trends, who is

doing the research, and where it is being done.

Figure 0.1— Semantic fingerprint of a scientific abstract after processing by the Elsevier Fingerprint Engine.

Appendix B

Semantic Fingerprinting

Page 23: Nanotechnologies Output, Impact and Collaboration...search query that utilizes key concepts extracted from a sample of relevant journals using a semantic technology called Elsevier

APPENDIX C 23

Source Title ISSN Coverage

ACS Nano 19360851 2007-

ongoing

Advances in Nanoporous

Materials

18787959 2010

Advances in Natural

Sciences: Nanoscience and

Nanotechnology

20436262 2010-

ongoing

Artificial Cells, Nanomedicine

and Biotechnology

21691401 2013-

ongoing

Beilstein Journal of

Nanotechnology

21904286 2010-

ongoing

BioNanoScience 21911630 2011-

ongoing

Cancer Nanotechnology 18686958 2010-

ongoing

Current Nanoscience 15734137 2006-

ongoing

Digest Journal of

Nanomaterials and

Biostructures

18423582 2009-

ongoing

e-Journal of Surface Science

and Nanotechnology

13480391 2005-

ongoing

European Journal of

Nanomedicine

16625986 2012-

ongoing,

2009-2010

Frontiers of Nanoscience 18762778 2011-

ongoing,

2009

Fullerenes Nanotubes and

Carbon Nanostructures

1536383X 2002-

ongoing

Handai Nanophotonics 15740641 2006-2007,

2004

IEE Proceedings

Nanobiotechnology

14781581 2003-2006

IEEE Nanotechnology

Magazine

19324510 2007-

ongoing

IEEE Transactions on

Nanobioscience

15361241 2002-

ongoing

IEEE Transactions on

Nanotechnology

1536125X 2002-

ongoing

IET Nanobiotechnology 17518741 2007-

ongoing

International Journal of Green

Nanotechnology

19430892 2011-

ongoing

International Journal of Green

Nanotechnology: Biomedicine

1943085X 2009-2012

International Journal of Green

Nanotechnology: Materials

Science and Engineering

19430841 2009-2010

International Journal of Green

Nanotechnology: Physics and

Chemistry

19430876 2009-2011

International Journal of Nano

and Biomaterials

17528933 2009-

ongoing

International Journal of

Nanoelectronics and

Materials

19855761 2012-

ongoing

International Journal of

Nanomanufacturing

17469392 2009-

ongoing

International Journal of

Nanomechanics Science and

Technology

19475748 2010-2012

International journal of

nanomedicine

11769114 2006-

ongoing

International Journal of

Nanoparticles

17532507 2009-

ongoing

International Journal of

Nanoscience

0219581X 2004-

ongoing

International Journal of

Nanotechnology

14757435 2004-

ongoing

International Journal of Smart

and Nano Materials

19475411 2010-

ongoing

Journal of Biomedical

Nanotechnology

15507033 2007-

ongoing

Journal of Bionanoscience 15577910 2008-

ongoing

Journal of Computational and

Theoretical Nanoscience

15461955 2004-

ongoing

Journal of Experimental

Nanoscience

17458080 2007-

ongoing

Journal of Laser Micro

Nanoengineering

18800688 2010-

ongoing

Journal of Metastable and

Nanocrystalline Materials

14226375 2003-2005

Appendix C

List of nanotechnology related journals

used to select the keywords

Page 24: Nanotechnologies Output, Impact and Collaboration...search query that utilizes key concepts extracted from a sample of relevant journals using a semantic technology called Elsevier

APPENDIX C 24

Journal of Micro/

Nanolithography, MEMS, and

MOEMS

19325150 2007-

ongoing

Journal of Micro-Nano

Mechatronics

18653928 2011-

ongoing,

2009-

ongoing

Journal of Nano- and

Electronic Physics

20776772 2009-

ongoing

Journal of Nano Research 16625250 2008-

ongoing

Journal of Nanobiotechnology 14773155 2003-

ongoing

Journal of Nanoelectronics

and Optoelectronics

1555130X 2007-

ongoing

Journal of Nanomaterials 16874110 2006-

ongoing

Journal of Nanomechanics

and Micromechanics

21535434 2011-

ongoing

Journal of Nanoneuroscience 19390637 2012, 2009

Journal of Nanoparticle

Research

13880764 1999-

ongoing

Journal of Nanophotonics 19342608 2007-

ongoing

Journal of Nanoscience and

Nanotechnology

15334880 2001-

ongoing

Journal of Nanostructured

Polymers and

Nanocomposites

17904439 2005-

ongoing

Journal of Nanotechnology 16879503 2010-

ongoing

Journal of Nanotechnology in

Engineering and Medicine

19492944 2010-

ongoing

Journal of Vacuum Science

and Technology B:

Microelectronics and

Nanometer Structures

10711023 1995-2008,

1992, 1986,

1982-1984

Journal of Vacuum Science

and Technology B:

Nanotechnology and

Microelectronics

21662754 2009-

ongoing,

1991-1992

Micro and Nano Letters 17500443 2007-

ongoing

Micro and Nanosystems 18764029 2010-

ongoing

Microfluidics and Nanofluidics 16134982 2004-

ongoing

Nami Jishu yu Jingmi

Gongcheng/Nanotechnology

and Precision Engineering

16726030 2006-

ongoing

Nano 17932920 2008-

ongoing

Nano - i Mikrosistemnaya

Tekhnika

18138586 2005

Nano Biomedicine 18835198 2009-

ongoing

Nano Biomedicine and

Engineering

21505578 2009-

ongoing

Nano Communication

Networks

18787789 2010-

ongoing

Nano Energy 22112855 2012-

ongoing

Nano Letters 15306984 2001-

ongoing

Nano Research 19980124 2009-

ongoing

Nano Today 17480132 2006-

ongoing

Nanobiotechnology 15511286 2005-2009

NanoEthics 18714757 2007-

ongoing

Nanomaterials and

Nanotechnology

2011-

ongoing

Nanomedicine 17435889 2006-

ongoing

Nanomedicine:

Nanotechnology, Biology, and

Medicine

15499634 2005-

ongoing

Nano-Micro Letters 21505551 2009-

ongoing

Nanopages 17874033 2010-

ongoing

Nanoscale 20403364 2009-

ongoing

Nanoscale Research Letters 19317573 2006-

ongoing

Nanoscience and

Nanotechnology - Asia

22106812 2011-

ongoing

Nanoscience and

Nanotechnology Letters

19414900 2010-

ongoing

NanoScience and Technology 14344904 2011-

ongoing

Nanostructured Materials 09659773 1992-1999

Nanotechnologies in Russia 19950780 2009-

ongoing

Nanotechnology 09574484 1990-

ongoing

Nanotechnology Law and

Business

15462080 2005-

ongoing

Nanotechnology Perceptions 16606795 2008-

ongoing

Nanotechnology, Science and

Applications

11778903 2010-

ongoing

Nanotoxicology 17435390 2007-

ongoing

Nature Nanotechnology 17483387 2006-

ongoing

Odgojne znanosti/Educational

Sciences

18461204 2009-

ongoing

Page 25: Nanotechnologies Output, Impact and Collaboration...search query that utilizes key concepts extracted from a sample of relevant journals using a semantic technology called Elsevier

APPENDIX C 25

Open Nanomedicine Journal 18759335 2011

Optical Nanoscopy 21922853 2012-

ongoing

Photonics and Nanostructures

- Fundamentals and

Applications

15694410 2003-

ongoing

Physica E: Low-Dimensional

Systems and Nanostructures

13869477 1997-

ongoing,

1973-1974

Proceedings of the Institution

of Mechanical Engineers, Part

N: Journal of

Nanoengineering and

Nanosystems

17403499 2008-

ongoing

Radovi - Zavoda za povijesne

znanosti HAZU u Zadru

13300474 2009-

ongoing

Recent Patents on

Nanotechnology

18722105 2007-

ongoing

RSC Nanoscience and

Nanotechnology

17577136 2009-2012

SPR Nanoscience 20493541 2014-

ongoing

Synthesis and Reactivity in

Inorganic, Metal-Organic and

Nano-Metal Chemistry

15533174 2005-

ongoing

Thin Films and

Nanostructures

15435016 2007-2008,

2005, 2002-

2003

Wiley interdisciplinary

reviews. Nanomedicine and

nanobiotechnology

19390041 2009-

ongoing

Page 26: Nanotechnologies Output, Impact and Collaboration...search query that utilizes key concepts extracted from a sample of relevant journals using a semantic technology called Elsevier

26

Page 27: Nanotechnologies Output, Impact and Collaboration...search query that utilizes key concepts extracted from a sample of relevant journals using a semantic technology called Elsevier

NOTES 27

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