Abstract
The article investigates the scientific performance of Russia in the field of nanotechnology, focusing on production, impact and collaboration. An underlying multidisciplinary corpus of publications was extracted from the Science Citation Index Expanded database through relevant keywords. The various bibliometric findings are presented in a top-down sequence, starting with a comparative analysis of Russia and other selected countries, scrutinizing further a revitalization of science in universities and finally presenting some (possible) centers of excellence within the domestic scientific system. Focusing on the most highly-cited nano papers, I use the analysis not only in terms of percentages of world shares of publications, but also in terms of the proportions of top-1 and top-10% publications. It is shown that among the comparative countries, Russia maximally increases the citation impact depending on its internationalization efforts and that, for example, the co-authorship between Russia and Australia in the top-10% layer as well as between Russia and the UK in the top-1% layer is above expectation. Implementing the president’s initiative “Strategy of Nanoindustry Development” and the role of governmental university-centered policy are discussed in light of the performed bibliometric study.
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Notes
Due to limited space, I have not considered some other major players in the NT field (such, as Spain, Italy, Australia, etc.), so what is it—a topic for future research.
In order to demonstrate on this Figure a more long historical trend for Russia, I calculated, by way of exception, some its output indicators for the 1990s.
The corresponding comparison is not shown here. Additionally, one could be noted: (1) a peak growth of the UK's top-1% contribution between 2005 and 2009 (likely, due to the highly cited papers on graphene); (2) a significant rise of India's share in the world nano research output, which has not yet been matched by an equivalent increasing of its presence in the elite structure of top-cited nano papers; (3) incipient in the last years decline of the Taiwan's positions as in terms of share of global nano papers output, so and presence in the top-1 and top-10% segments. According made calculations (not shown here), the shares of top-cited nano papers from USA, China and Singapore are noticeably higher their percentages of world shares of nano papers. The opposite situation is observed in India, Iran and Russia.
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Acknowledgements
This research draws on support from the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR) under Project #16-06-00009. I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback to improve this article.
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Appendices
Appendix 1
The search string that has been used:
Title = ([(nano*) not (nanosecond* or nanogram* or nanoliter* or nanomol* or nanoplankton* or NaNO2 or NaNO3 or Nanog)] or (“scanning probe microscop*” or “scanning tunnel microscop*” or “scanning force microscop*” or “scanning electron microscop*” or “atom* force microscop*”) or (fulleren* or fullerit* or fullerid* or fullero* or buckybal* or buckminsterfulleren* or buckytub* or peapod* or graphene* or graphane* or C60 or C-60 or C70 or C-70 or MWCNT* or DWCNT* or SWCNT*) or (“quantum* dot*” or “quantum* well*” or “quantum* wire*”) or (bionano* or dendrimer* or “molecul* motor*”) or (“photonic crystal*” or metamaterial* or “QD laser*” or plasmonics)).
Appendix 2
See Table 9.
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Terekhov, A.I. Bibliometric spectroscopy of Russia’s nanotechnology: 2000–2014. Scientometrics 110, 1217–1242 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2234-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2234-5