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Corporate engagement with nanotechnology through research publications

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Abstract

Assessing corporate engagement with an emerging technology is essential for understanding the development of research and innovation systems. Corporate publishing is used as a system-level knowledge transfer indicator, but prior literature suggests that publishing can run counter to private sector needs for management of dissemination to ensure appropriability of research benefits. We examine the extent of corporate authorship and collaboration in nanotechnology publications from 2000 to 2019. The analysis identified 53,200 corporate nanotechnology publications. Despite the potential for limits on collaboration with corporate authors, this paper finds that eight out of 10 nanotechnology corporate publications involved authors from multiple organizations and nearly one-third from multiple countries and that these percentages were higher in recent years. The USA is the leading nation in corporate nanotechnology publishing, followed by Japan and Germany, with China ranking fourth, albeit with the greatest publication growth rate. US corporate publishing is more highly cited and less cross-nationally collaborative. Asian countries also have fewer collaborative authorship ties outside of their home countries. European countries had more corporate collaborations with authors affiliated with organizations outside of their home countries. The paper concludes that distinguishing corporate publications, while difficult due to challenges in identifying small- and medium-sized corporations and grouping variations in corporate names, can be beneficial to examining national systems of research and development.

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Data Availability

This article is based on bibliometric and text analyses of sets of nanotechnology-related research publication abstracts from Web of Science. We provide information on the search routines used to locate, and then download, those records. These instructions allow an interested party with suitable license to those databases to regenerate comparable datasets.

Code availability

Routines employed in the analyses are available via the analytic software used—VantagePoint [www.theVantagePoint.com] and MS Excel.

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Funding

This research has been conducted with support from the US National Science Foundation under Award No. 1759960 (Indicators of Technological Emergence) and Award No. 2025462 (NNCI: Southeastern Nanotechnology Infrastructure Corridor (SENIC)). The findings and observations contained in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Jan Youtie, Robert Ward, Philip Shapira & Alan L. Porter

  2. University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

    Philip Shapira

  3. Search Technology, Inc., Peachtree Corners, GA, USA

    Alan L. Porter & Nils Newman

  4. UNU-MERIT, Maastricht University, Maastricht, NL, Netherlands

    Nils Newman

Authors
  1. Jan Youtie
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  2. Robert Ward
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  3. Philip Shapira
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  4. Alan L. Porter
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  5. Nils Newman
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jan Youtie.

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Alan Porter and Nils Newman are employees of Search Technology, Inc., which develops and markets analytical software (VantagePoint) used in these analyses. There are no other conflicts of interest.

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Youtie, J., Ward, R., Shapira, P. et al. Corporate engagement with nanotechnology through research publications. J Nanopart Res 23, 85 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11051-021-05195-4

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