A bibliometric investigation of research performance in emerging nanobiopharmaceuticals
Research highlights
▶ The paper provides new insight into development in emerging nanobiopharmaceuticals in the field of informetrics. ▶ The paper performs cross-country comparisons in research performance in the field of nanobiopharmaceuticals. ▶ The paper also identifies top keywords and pivot publications in the evolution of nanobiopharmaceutical research using social network analysis.
Introduction
The identification of research areas should be an important theme in informetrics, which is especially attractive for the inter- and multidisciplinary domains’ emergence to bring new breaking points of modern scientific and technological research in the post-genomic age. From the 1960s onwards, the term interdisciplinarity has become a major topic in academic and policy oriented discourse on knowledge production and research funding (Huutoniemia, Kleinb, Bruunc, & Hukkinena, 2009). Braun and Schubert (2003) showed an exponential increase in the number of scientific papers labeled as ‘multi-’ or ‘interdisciplinary’, which indicates that the ‘multi-’ or ‘interdisciplinary’ scientific research is an increasingly popular domain in the modern scientific research environments. This means that scientometric evaluations oriented to inter- and multidisciplinary research domains are promising.
The three emerging interdisciplinary domains, nanobiotechnology (Takeda, Mae, Kajikawa, & Matsushima, 2009) (or bionanotechnology (Rafols & Meyer, 2007)), biopharmaceuticals and nanopharmaceuticals (Bawarski et al., 2008, Gaur and Bhatia, 2008) have perceived especial attention in the up-to-date scientometric study due to their economic and political importance. The multidisciplinarity among the three domains is benefit for the future design and development of the ever more sophisticated nanobiotechnologies, which is needed to realize the full potential of the post-genomic age (Duncan, 2003). One key application of the nanobiotechnology is in the field of pharmaceutical sciences (Jain, 2008, Takeda et al., 2009). Jain (2008) indicated that nanobiopharmaceuticals is an ever-growing field and destine to play a significant role in the future of healthcare. Among the key fields targeted for growth under the China's Medium & Long Term Scientific and Technological Development Plan Guidelines for the period 2006–2020 (MLP) are nanobiopharmaceuticals. There is a large increase in China's nanobiopharmaceutical research activities since its implementation in January, 2006 (Lenoir & Herron, 2009).
Durán and Marcato (2008) showed that nanobiotechnology, involving biological systems manufactured at the molecular level, is a relatively new multidisciplinary field that has fostered the development of nanoscaled pharmaceutical delivery devices. Pharmaceutical nanobiotechnology can address many important health crises using nanoscale-structured materials and simple nanobiodevices (Veerapandian & Yun, 2009). Nanobiotechnologies are being used to research the pathomechanism of disease, refine molecular diagnostics, and help in the discovery, development, and delivery of drugs (Jain, 2008). The term “nanobiopharmaceuticals”, which is used to define the emerging multidisciplinary domain among nanotechnology, biotechnology and pharmaceuticals, was firstly introduced in Jain's book “The Handbook of Nanomedicine” in 2008 (Jain, 2008) and then studied in the latest four international research papers: Veerapandian and Yun (2009) in Digest Journal of nanomaterials and biostructures, Veerapandian, Marimuthu, Yun, and Kim (2009) in Thai Journal of Pharmaceutical Science, Shahabade et al. (2009) in Journal of Pharmacy Research, and Lenoir and Herron (2009) in Journal of Biomedical Discovery and Collaboration.
Although the nanobiotechnology is playing an increasingly promoting role in pharmaceutical research and development, there is no scientometric study on nanobiopharmaceuticals which is an emerging and definitely important research domain from nanobiotechnology. The aim of this study is to investigate the nanobiopharmaceutical research using the bibliometric method with visual mapping. This study is focused on the detection of academic landscape of nanobiopharmaceutical research, and the cross-country comparisons in nanobiopharm-publications’ efforts (investments), returns (impact) and efficiency (quality). We also employ co-occurrence (including co-word and co-citation) network analyses with visualization to detect major research domains and, track the evolution footprints of intellectual turning points in the nanobiopharmaceutical research in the given time window.
Section snippets
Methods and data collections
Bibliometric quantification is a basic but an effective way to detect and examine the emergence of a new technology (Braun & Schubert, 2003). The bibliometric study involves the statistical analysis of scientific publications, which adopts quantitative performance indicators to get over the disadvantage of subjectivity in peer review and expert judgments (Van Raan, 2004), and has been used to assess research performance in an increasing amount and variety of studies (Rinia, van Leeuwen, van
Overall growth—big science stage
One way of monitoring the emergence of new fields is to peruse many documents published on the topic (Braun et al., 1997). A more simple and perhaps more enlightening approach to the growth of a field could be offered by the bibliometric (scientometric) quantification of a related specific term in the journal papers during a determined period.
Fig. 1 shows the number of nanobiopharmaceutical publications and citations produced per year in Web of Science during 1991–2008. As is shown in Fig. 1,
Concluding remarks
The term inter- or multidiscipline resulting from knowledge fusion, and the term science mapping identifying knowledge's critical evolution footprints increasingly receive special attention in the latest scientometric study. In this study, a coherent comprehensive scientometric evaluation framework is employed to investigate an emerging and promising multidiscipline: nanobiopharmaceuticals. We detect and map the emerging domain's key development landscape, including growth pattern, intellectual
Acknowledgements
This research is funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Project No. 70773006). The authors are very grateful for the valuable comments and suggestions of the anonymous reviewers, which significantly improved the article.
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These authors contributed equally to this paper.