ABSTRACT
A wide range of analytical activities have been undertaken to understand the nature of nanotechnology [1-3,6-8,10]. A common recognition of nanotechnology is that it is an interdisciplinary research field. Huang et al. conducted a large-scale text-based analysis on the titles and abstracts of nanotechnology-related patents in the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and identified major research topics in the field of nanotechnology and nanoscience [3]. Meyer identified four large clusters of nanotechnology invention areas through the analysis of cooccurrences of the International Patent Classification (IPC) of nanotechnology patents in the USPTO [7]. It was pointed out that nanotechnology and nanoscience are a set of inter-related and overlapping but not necessarily merging technologies. Several studies on scientific publications have also been undertaken. Schummer investigated multi-and inter-disciplinary nanotechno-logy and nanoscience by applying a co-author analysis to the eight existing “nano journals”. The analysis showed that current nanometre scale research reveals no particular patterns or degrees of inter-disciplinarity and that the multi-disciplinarity derives from loose interaction between traditional scholarly fields [9].
