Today, while reading about patterns of research publication in nanotechnology, I came across as striking table that presents the number of nanotechnology papers published by the world’s most prolific authors, listing them together with their countries and institutions:
This table of 2005 data is from a 2007 paper, “Global nanotechnology research metrics”, published in the journal Scientometrics. The authors are with the U.S. Office of Naval Research, and the Institute for Defense Analyses.
This data has a degree of relevance to an essay, “Asia and the elements of innovation”, that I recently wrote for the worldwide management consulting firm McKinsey & Company.
Overall, though, I leave interpretations to the reader.
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Benj 10.31.09 at 4:12 am UTC
Amazing, but I’m not surprised. It is trough technology that China will reach the grade of number 1 world power. There is a technological Tsunami building up there.
Having studied some industrial nanotechnology products (nanotubes and nano powders), China was already in a dominant position.
Benj
Scott Jensen 10.31.09 at 11:09 am UTC
I would be more interested in how many each countries puts out as a whole than individual scientists. That would reflect more on where a nation is going with nanotechnology and/or who “dominates” it.
Scott Jensen 10.31.09 at 11:16 am UTC
Also, which publications the papers appeared in would also reflect on their quality and importance. How many were in “Science” for example. You can almost always find some scientific journal willing to print the results of even the most insignificant bit of research. And then there are the national scientific journals that only takes papers from their citizens and they are meaningless. Those are like parents who judge their little girl the cutest girl in the world.
And if there was one scientist that published one paper in “Science” and none of those listed above were in “Science”, I would say that one-paper scientist contributed more than all of them.
Patrick 10.31.09 at 11:24 am UTC
While an interesting paper, for what it’s worth, people who have done similar studies have come up with very different results and analyses. One materials scientist from Harvard that I asked about this paper suggested the analytical categories and data collection were problematic. But I also suspect this comes back to the fundamental problem of defining what nano is.
Eric Drexler 10.31.09 at 7:09 pm UTC
Yes, although I found the table striking, its data can’t be read as a measure of the total quality or quantity of research, and more generally, the analytical categories used for bibliometric studies of nanotechnology are as ambiguous as the definition of the field itself.
Questions of quantity and quality are addressed in a 2006 paper, “The Emergence of China as a Leading Nation in Science” [pdf], which is more strongly focused on nanotechnology than the title would suggest. (Note: it has one Chinese and one EU author.) To quote from the abstract:
This is consistent with my impression from other sources. Citation metrics and rates of publication in leading journals indicate that the quality of papers from China has lagged, but is improving a reasonably rapid pace.
Patrick 11.01.09 at 10:53 am UTC
I looked at the 2005 paper – I think one of the challenges, of course, is separating the wheat from the chaff in terms of truly important papers and where these originate from. But this is just a variation on the Kuhnian norma/revolutionary science dichotomy, I suppose. Another factor is international collaboration. My work on spintronics with Tim Lenoir (Duke) showed a lot of US-Japanese collab in this sub-field. A closer look at US-China/Taiwan collab might be interesting as well as the phenomenon of Chinese-American scientists working with people in PRC or returning “home.” Finally, may I suggest the work of Richard Appelbaum and his research group:
http://www.cns.ucsb.edu/research-at-cns-ucsb-18/
nanotürkiye 11.13.09 at 1:07 pm UTC
Table showing company distributions across countries will be much more helpful for determining the “winner” of nanotechnology. Also don’t you also think that 2005 is “too old.”
YIKES! 11.18.09 at 8:17 am UTC
Who is ahead in safety and containment of nanotechnology? The same people managing plastics and e-waste?