| Session Title: Assessment of Emergent Technologies: The Case of Nanotechnology |
| Multipaper Session 322 to be held in Wekiwa 6 on Thursday, Nov 12, 1:40 PM to 3:10 PM |
| Sponsored by the Research, Technology, and Development Evaluation TIG |
| Chair(s): |
| Juan Rogers, Georgia Institute of Technology, jdrogers@gatech.edu |
| Abstract: The papers in this panel will address several complementary issues in the assessment of nanotechnology as an emerging field. The first paper will present new metrics and maps of the field using new techniques to follow the evolution of its content and links across the scientific community. The second will present a bibliometric approach to track the impact of various funding streams to the field of nanotechnology. The third will present the results of a mixed-methods approach to establish the development path and uses of a specific strand of nanotechnology, namely, active nanostructures. The final paper will present an analysis of the dynamics of distributions of publications and citations in the field to understand its underlying probability structure. Taken together, these papers present a set of new tools to assess emerging fields since the approaches themselves are not limited to this particular field. |
| Assessing Nanotechnology: Research Metrics and Maps |
| Alan Porter, Georgia Institute of Technology, alan.porter@isye.gatech.edu |
| New and Emerging Science & Technology ["NES&T"] research raises special evaluation challenges. Many believe that interdisciplinary processes are essential to advance such areas. However, assessing interdisciplinarity poses conceptual, data, and analytical challenges. We illustrate for selected nanoscience & nanoengineering ["nano"] topics. Our Integration score improves upon alternative metrics (e.g., Shannon & Herfindahl diversity indices), as it addresses all three components of diversity - variety, balance, and disparity. The Integration score is calculated from the distribution of a paper's (or set of papers) cited journals, from which we get associated Subject Categories (Web of Science), and cluster those into macro-disciplines. Further using this information, we compose a family of visualizations that provide multiple perspectives on the nature of the research under scrutiny. These include: intellectual and social research networks , science overlay and citation link maps, and research coherence maps. The metrics and maps provide rich insights into research practices and impacts. |
| Who is Funding Nanotechnology and How? Evidence From Publication Analysis |
| Jue Wang, Florida International University, jwang@fiu.edu |
| The US government has been playing an important role in promoting the development of nanotechnology by setting up R&D programs and providing research funding. An annual budget of $1.5 is allocated to nanotechnology through the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) in recent years. With such a large amount of government investment, it is interesting and also important to learn how the money is spent and what is produced from it. This study seeks to probe the funding pattern of federal agencies and their contribution to scientific development of nanotechnology. Using acknowledgement analysis, this study links publication records to their respective funding agencies. It compares the impact of these funding agencies by investigating the quality of funded research, the amount of research output, its specialization field, recipients and their institutions. |
| Assessing the Development Path of "Active Nanotechnology" |
| Vrishali Subramanian, Georgia Institute of Technology, vsubramani6@gatech.edu |
| Regulating nanotechnology requires understanding whether actual technology developments follow the path intended by funding policies. We focus on the case of "active nanotechnology" as a case a point. The NSF Active Nanostructures and Nanosystems grant solicitation defines an active nanostructure as "An active nanostructure changes or evolves its state during its operation," and gives the following examples: nanoelectromechanical systems, nanomachines, self-healing materials, nanobiodevices, transistors, amplifiers, targeted drugs and chemicals, actuators, molecular machines, light-driven molecular motors, plasmonics, nanoscale fluidics, laser-emitting devices, adaptive nanostructures, energy storage devices, and sensors. With this definition we develop a search strategy to bound active nanotechnology and establish the patterns of development. We perform bibliometric analysis and describe the main publication trends. We chose some novel technology prototypes from these and interviewed scientists in order to understand how they were developed and how they might be commercialized. The results are compared to the given policy rationale. |
| Publication and Citation Distributions in the Development of Nanotechnology |
| Juan Rogers, Georgia Institute of Technology, jdrogers@gatech.edu |
| Nanotechnology has emerged recently as an interdisciplinary field and the question arises as to field specific patterns of its citation and publication distributions. The upper tail of typical distributions of citations per paper and publications per author follow power laws which are scale free and, therefore, self-similar for natural aggregations of papers or authors. In this paper, we will explore the dynamics of these distributions for nanotechnology from 1990 to find any special patterns given the interdisciplinary nature of the field. We will model the citation process as a random graph and the publications per author distribution as an Information Production Process (IPP) to determine the evolution of the distributions in time. The result will be a complete specification of the probability structure of citations and publications in this interdisciplinary field which provides the basis for interpretation and benchmarking of most bibliometric indicators of research performance. |