Revealing Impact of Nanotechnology Funding through the Literature

Nanotechnology research success is guided by international cooperation as much as money

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Revealing Impact of Nanotechnology Funding through the Literature

In the December 2nd edition of Nature (subscription required) there is an article written by Philip Shapira & Jue Wang in which an attempt is made to gauge the impact of the last 10 years of nanotechnology funding by using data mining on the literature.

I suppose this is as useful as any other method, such as counting patents or making up lists of commercial products that might somehow be affiliated with nanotechnology. But quantitative analysis of what is more or less a qualitative phenomenon is always a tricky business.

Nonetheless, since the article makes some critical points that I have made, I find myself in unequivocal agreement with some of their conclusions, such as: “We find that despite the initial focus on national initiatives, patterns of nanotechnology funding and collaboration transcend country boundaries.”

So try as you might to make your geographical region the next nanotechnology hub, you might be somewhat disappointed in the result. Not only is nanotechnology research interdisciplinary, but also is international and depends on cross-border cooperation to succeed as this article points out.

Shapira and Wang were able to build much of their research by using the recent practice by the Thomson Reuters bibliographic and citation database of including funding-acknowledgement data with research projects. In the period of 2008-2009, 67% of nanotechnology publications provided that data.

With this data set, the two researchers reached a number of conclusions, including the noteworthy, but not surprising, idea that “China is close to the United States in number of publications, but still lags behind the United States and Europe in publication quality.”

But the idea that seems to resonate the most with the two authors is that international partnering and cooperation is key to successful nanotechnology research.

When they pose themselves the question of how countries like the US, Germany and Japan should stimulate their research when it is likely that funding will remain flat, they offer: “One way would be to foster more high-quality international collaborations, perhaps by opening funding competitions to international researchers and by offering travel and mobility awards for domestic researchers to increase alliances with colleagues in other countries.”

Sorry politicos, science just doesn’t understand national boundaries.

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