The structure and infrastructure of the global nanotechnology literature

Text mining is the extraction of useful information from large volumes of text. A text mining analysis of the global open nanotechnology literature was performed. Records from the Science Citation Index (SCI)/Social SCI were analyzed to provide the infrastructure of the global nanotechnology literature (prolific authors/journals/institutions/countries, most cited authors/papers/journals) and the thematic structure (taxonomy) of the global nanotechnology literature, from a science perspective. Records from the Engineering Compendex (EC) were analyzed to provide a taxonomy from a technology perspective. The Far Eastern countries have expanded nanotechnology publication output dramatically in the past decade. The Peoples Republic of China ranks second to the USA (2004 results) in nanotechnology papers published in the SCI, and has increased its nanotechnology publication output by a factor of 21 in a decade. Of the six most prolific (publications) nanotechnology countries, the three from the Western group (USA, Germany, France) have about eight percent more nanotechnology publications (for 2004) than the three from the Far Eastern group (China, Japan, South Korea). While most of the high nanotechnology publication-producing countries are also high nanotechnology patent producers in the US Patent Office (as of 2003), China is a major exception. China ranks 20th as a nanotechnology patent-producing country in the US Patent Office.