The Network Structure of Nanotechnology Research Output of Turkey: A Co-authorship and Co-word Analysis Study

This paper aims to assess the diffusion of nanotechnology knowledge within the Turkish scientific community using co-citation and co-word analysis techniques. We retrieved a total of 10,062 records of nanotechnology papers authored by Turkish researchers between 2000 and 2011 from Web of Science (WoS) and divided the data set into two 6-year periods. We identified the most prolific and collaborative top 15 universities in each period based on their network properties. We then created co-authorship networks of Turkish nanotechnology researchers in each period and identified the most prolific and collaborative top 15 authors on the basis of network centrality coefficients. Finally, we used co-word analysis to identify the major nanotechnology research fields in Turkey on the basis of the co-occurrence of words in the titles of papers. Findings show that nanotechnology research in Turkey continues to increase due to researchers collaborating with their colleagues. Turkish researchers tend to collaborate within their own groups or universities and the overall connectedness of the network is thus low. Their publication and collaboration patterns conform to Lotka's law. They work mainly on nanotechnology applications in Materials Sciences, Chemistry and Physics, among others. This is commensurate, more or less, with the global trends in nanotechnology research and development.