How to identify research groups using publication analysis: an example in the field of nanotechnology

Summary We present a new bibliometric approach to identify research groups in a particular research field. With a combination of bibliometric mapping techniques and network analysis we identify and classify clusters of authors to represent research groups. In this paper we illustrate the application and potential of this approach and present two types of outcomes: actual research groups and potential research groups. The former enables us to define research groups beyond the organizational structure. The latter may be used to identify potential partners for collaboration. Our approach is a starting point to deal with the complex issue of research groups in a changing structure of scientific research.     

Patents from Latin America and Spain with Latipat: Country coverage and ability to search for emerging topics like nanotechnology

The Latipat project unifies patent information from 20 Ibero-American countries making this content available and free of cost via several major public patent search systems: namely Espacenet, Patentscope and Invenes. These different accesses are presented and their data coverage is analysed. A comparison showed that, although the patent information comes from the same origin, the country coverage and actuality of the patent information varies substantially in the three compared search systems. Regarding the technology coverage, an exemplary search for nanotechnology patents revealed different results depending on the keyword and classification support of each search system.     

Funding acknowledgement analysis: an enhanced tool to investigate research sponsorship impacts: the case of nanotechnology

There is increasing interest in assessing how sponsored research funding influences the development and trajectory of science and technology. Traditionally, linkages between research funding and subsequent results are hard to track, often requiring access to separate funding or performance reports released by researchers or sponsors. Tracing research sponsorship and output linkages is even more challenging when researchers receive multiple funding awards and collaborate with a variety of differentially-sponsored research colleagues. This article presents a novel bibliometric approach to undertaking funding acknowledgement analysis which links research outputs with their funding sources. Using this approach in the context of nanotechnology research, the article probes the funding patterns of leading countries and agencies including patterns of cross-border research sponsorship. We identify more than 91,500 nanotechnology articles published worldwide during a 12-month period in 2008–2009. About 67% of these publications include funding acknowledgements information. We compare articles reporting funding with those that do not (for reasons that may include reliance on internal core-funding rather than external awards as well as omissions in reporting). While we find some country and field differences, we judge that the level of reporting of funding sources is sufficiently high to provide a basis for analysis. The funding acknowledgement data is used to compare nanotechnology funding policies and programs in selected countries and to examine their impacts on scientific output. We also examine the internationalization of research funding through the interplay of various funding sources at national and organizational levels. We find that while most nanotechnology funding is nationally-oriented, internationalization and knowledge exchange does occur as researchers collaborate across borders. Our method offers a new approach not only in identifying the funding sources of publications but also in feasibly undertaking large-scale analyses across scientific fields, institutions and countries.     

International collaboration development in nanotechnology: a perspective of patent network analysis

International collaboration has played an important role in the development of nanotechnology. Patents encompass valuable technological information and collaborative efforts. Thus, this paper examines international collaboration development in nanotechnology using patent network analysis. The results show that the number of international collaboration nanotechnology patents has increased steadily and the proportion of them of total nanotechnology patents has likewise exhibited an upward trend. USA has always been the most influential participant with largest number of international collaboration patents. Asian countries/regions have shown an obvious increase in the number of international collaboration patents. By contrast, there have shown a generally decline in European countries. More and more countries have become actively engaged in international collaboration in nanotechnology with increasingly closer relationships. Two styles of international collaboration exit: while USA, Germany, UK and Japan collaborate with a wide range of countries/regions; Spain, Israel, Russia, Singapore and Taiwan are more selective in their collaboration partners. Though International collaboration has yet to find global significance in terms of patent citation impacts, it has nevertheless been incremental in improving patent citation impacts for most of the top 20 countries/regions since 2004.     

DyNAMiC Workbench: an integrated development environment for dynamic DNA nanotechnology

Dynamic DNA nanotechnology provides a promising avenue for implementing sophisticated assembly processes, mechanical behaviours, sensing and computation at the nanoscale. However, design of these systems is complex and error-prone, because the need to control the kinetic pathway of a system greatly increases the number of design constraints and possible failure modes for the system. Previous tools have automated some parts of the design workflow, but an integrated solution is lacking. Here, we present software implementing a three ‘tier’ design process: a high-level visual programming language is used to describe systems, a molecular compiler builds a DNA implementation and nucleotide sequences are generated and optimized. Additionally, our software includes tools for analysing and ‘debugging’ the designs in silico, and for importing/exporting designs to other commonly used software systems. The software we present is built on many existing pieces of software, but is integrated into a single package—accessible using a Web-based interface at http://molecular-systems.net/workbench. We hope that the deep integration between tools and the flexibility of this design process will lead to better experimental results, fewer experimental design iterations and the development of more complex DNA nanosystems.     

Removing spurious signals from glow curves using an optimal Wiener filter

During readout, the signal of the TLD is occasionally polluted with spurious signals. These most often take the shape of a spike on the glow curve. Often these spikes are only a few milliseconds wide but can have a height that significantly influences the outcome of the dose evaluation. The detection of spikes relies generally on comparing the raw glow curve with a smoothed version of it. A spike is detected when the height of the glow curve exceeds that of the smoothed curve, using criteria based on the absolute and relative differences. The procedure proposed is based on smoothing by an optimal Wiener filter, which is, on its turn, based on Fourier analysis for which numerically very efficient methods are available. Apart from having easy to understand tuning parameters, an attractive bonus is that, with only little additional computational effort, estimates of the position of peak maxima are found from second and third derivatives: a useful feature for glow curve quality control.     

The structure and analysis of nanotechnology co-author and citation networks

Research activities and collaborations in nanoscale science and engineering have major implications for advancing technological frontiers in many fields including medicine, electronics, energy, and communication. The National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) promotes efforts to cultivate effective research and collaborations among nano scientists and engineers to accelerate the advancement of nanotechnology and its commercialization. As of August 2008, there have been over 800 products considered to benefit from nanotechnology directly or indirectly. However, today’s accomplishments in nanotechnology cannot be transformed into commercial products without productive collaborations among experts from disparate research areas such as chemistry, physics, math, biology, engineering, manufacturing, environmental sciences, and social sciences. To study the patterns of collaboration, we build and analyze the collaboration network of scientists and engineers who conduct research in nanotechnology. We study the structure of information flow through citation network of papers authored by nano area scientists. We believe that the study of nano area co-author and paper citation networks improve our understanding of patterns and trends of the current research efforts in this field. We construct these networks based on the publication data collected for years ranging 1993 through 2008 from the scientific literature database “Web of Science”. We explore those networks to find out whether they follow power-law degree distributions and/or if they have a signature of hierarchy. We investigate the small-world characteristics and the existence of possible community structures in those networks. We estimate the statistical properties of the networks and interpret their significance with respect to the nano field.     

Nanobiotechnology as an emerging research domain from nanotechnology: A bibliometric approach

Nanotechnology has been intensively investigated by bibliometric methods due to its technological importance and expected impacts on economic activity. However, there is less focus on nanobiotechnology, which is an emerging research domain in nanotechnology. In this paper, we study the current status of the former, with our primary focus being to reveal the structure and research domains in nanobiotechnology. We also examine country and institutional performance in nanobiotechnology. It emerged that nanostructures, drug delivery and biomedical applications, bio-imaging, and carbon nanotubes and biosensors are the major research domains, while the USA is the leading country, and China has also made substantial contribution. Most institutions having a major impact in the area of nanobiotechnology are located in the USA.     

Capturing new developments in an emerging technology: an updated search strategy for identifying nanotechnology research outputs

Bibliometric analysis of publication metadata is an important tool for investigating emerging fields of technology. However, the application of field definitions to define an emerging technology is complicated by ongoing and at times rapid change in the underlying technology itself. There is limited prior work on adapting the bibliometric definitions of emerging technologies as these technologies change over time. The paper addresses this gap. We draw on the example of the modular keyword nanotechnology search strategy developed at Georgia Institute of Technology in 2006. This search approach has seen extensive use in analyzing emerging trends in nanotechnology research and innovation. Yet with the growth of the nanotechnology field, novel materials, particles, technologies, and tools have appeared. We report on the process and results of reviewing and updating this nanotechnology search strategy. By employing structured text-mining software to profile keyword terms, and by soliciting input from domain experts, we identify new nanotechnology-related keywords. We retroactively apply the revised evolutionary lexical query to 20 years of publication data and analyze the results. Our findings indicate that the updated search approach offers an incremental improvement over the original strategy in terms of recall and precision. Additionally, the updated strategy reveals the importance for nanotechnology of several emerging cited-subject categories, particularly in the biomedical sciences, suggesting a further extension of the nanotechnology knowledge domain. The implications of the work for applying bibliometric definitions to emerging technologies are discussed.     

Metrology and standards in nanotechnology

The problems of metrological support in nanotechnology and the trends in the development of nanometrology are discussed. The present state of standardization in the nanotechnology industry is analyzed. Translated from Izmerital'naya Tekhnika, No. 9, pp. 45–48, September, 2008.     

Publications and patents in nanotechnology

Nanotechnology and the sciences that are associated with it have attracted much attention. Experts from various fields believe that nanotechnology will be one of the key technologies affecting almost every aspect of the economy. While there are considerable efforts underway that aim to commercialise nanotechnology - carried by start-up companies as well as large internationally operating firms -, most of the activity seems to focus on research and development activities. There have been a number of technology studies and investment reports that describe the opportunities associated with this emerging area. Over the years there have also been a number of bibliometric and patent studies that examined the field. This paper provides an overview of measuring nanotechnology with commonly used indicators of bibliometric and patent analyses. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Scanning the controls: genomics and nanotechnology

We outline some of the possible applications of nanotechnology to modern molecular biology and discuss several technologies that can be used to make nanoscale confining environments (channels or post arrays) for long polymers such as DNA. A particular emphasis is placed on making large arrays using non-electron beam lithography methods. We then discuss how focused ion beam (FIB) milling can be used to construct nearfield slits for examining molecules     

Lane heading difference: An innovative model for drowsy driving detection using retrospective analysis around curves

Driving while sleepy is a serious contributor to automobile accidents. Previous research has shown that drowsy drivers produce systematic errors (variability) in vehicle behavior which are detectable using vehicle monitoring technology. The current study developed a new methodological approach using a vehicle heading difference metric to detect drowsy driving more effectively than other more commonly used methods. Twenty participants completed a driving scenario as well as several measures of fatigue in five testing sessions across a night of sleep deprivation. Each simulated highway driving session lasted 20 min, and was analyzed for lateral lane position variability and vehicle heading difference variability with two statistical methods. Fatigue measures monitored reaction time, attention, and oculomotor movement. The results showed that examining lane heading difference using the absolute value of the raw data detected driving variability better across the night than other statistical models. The results from the fatigue measures indicated an increase in reaction time and response lapses, as well as a decrease in oculomotor reactivity across the night. These results suggest that in fatigued drivers the statistical model using the absolute value of lane heading could be an improved metric for drowsy driving detection that could accurately detect detriments in driving ability at lower levels of fatigue.     

Internationalization and evolution of application areas of an emerging technology: The case of nanotechnology

Nanotechnology patenting has grown rapidly in recent years as an increasing number of countries are getting into the global nanotechnology race. Using a refined methodology to identify and classify nanotechnology patents, this paper analyses the changing pattern of internationalization of nanotechnology patenting activities from 1976–2004. We show that the dominance of the G5 countries have declined in recent years, not only in terms of quantity, but also in terms of quality as measured by citation indicators. In addition, using a new approach to classifying the intended areas of commercial applications, we show that nanotechnology patenting initially emphasized instrumentation, but exhibited greater diversification to other application areas in recent years. Significant differences in application area specialization are also found among major nanotechnology nations. Moreover, universities are found to play a significant and increasing role in patenting, particularly in US, UK and Canada.     

Soap and sand: construction tools for nanotechnology

Nanotechnology is the science of making and using very small structures. As the scales of the constructions become smaller, the existing methods of making these structures--lithography, etching and micromoulding--although constantly improving, will reach physical limits. To overcome the limitations and create smaller, designed and ordered structures, a so-called 'bottom-up' approach must be used. In bottom-up manufacture, self-assembly and nanocasting using molecular assemblies is a burgeoning area of research producing promising materials with current and future applications. In particular, the use of amphiphilic molecules, such as surfactants, which are familiar to most people as the soap bubbles in their kitchen sink, form a range of very uniform structures in the 1-100 nm size range that can be used to direct the structure of other materials. This paper reviews the use of surfactant templating to create nanoscale structures focusing on recent advances in the understanding of how the ordered nanostructures form, and the developing appreciation of how emergent larger-scale structures made of these materials come about.     

Reliability analysis and reliability-based design optimization of roadway horizontal curves using a first-order reliability method

This article presents reliability analysis and reliability-based optimization of roadway minimum radius design based on vehicle dynamics, mainly focusing on exit ramps and interchanges. The performance functions are formulated as failure modes of vehicle rollover and sideslip. To accurately describe the failure modes, analytical models for rollover and sideslip are derived considering nonlinear characteristics of vehicle behaviour using the commercial software TruckSim. The probability of an accident is evaluated using the first-order reliability method and numerical studies are conducted using a single-unit truck model. To propose a practical application for the study, the reliability analysis for the minimum radius recommended by American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials is conducted. The results show that, even if there are deviations from assumed design conditions of the current design guideline, the proposed design method can guarantee given target margins of safety against rollover and sideslip. Based on the reliability analysis, reliability-based design optimization is carried out and the results indicate new recommendations for minimum radii satisfying given target reliability levels.