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

A comprehensive review of more than 120 social science studies on nanotechnology, 90% of which are based on the analyses of the nanotechnology publications and patents, discusses four intellectual debates formed by these studies, namely whether nanotechnology is an interdisciplinary field, whether nanoscience and nanotechnology are closely interlinked, whether Nanotechnology development is path dependent and who is winning the global nanorace.

Abstract

We undertake a comprehensive review of more than 120 social science studieson nanotechnology, 90% of which are based on the analyses of the nanotechnology pub-lications and patents. We discussed four intellectual debates formed by these studies,namely whether nanotechnology is an interdisciplinary field, whether nanoscience andnanotechnology are closely interlinked, whether nanotechnology development is pathdependent and who is winning the global nanorace. We also conduct a comparativeanalysis of bibliometric search strategies used in the literature to harvest the publicationsand patents, including lexical queries, evolutionary lexical queries, citation analysis, andthe use of core journal sets to identify nanotechnology articles. Because most of thecompared strategies, except the one using 10 core journals in the field, share a core set ofkeywords and thus harvest a common batch of publications, they produce very similarranking tables of the top subject areas and journals and the most prolific countries andinstitutions. Moreover, the core journal strategy does not provide a robust delineation of anemerging field such as nanotechnology due to the fact that nanotechnology related articlesare published in a wide range of journals. Also, the different criteria for selecting the corejournals will affect the analytical results dramatically.