Russia’s Place in an Evolving Nanotechnological Landscape

Nanotechnology (NT) is the first global scientific and technological initiative of the 21st century, which attracted considerable research, economic, and political interest. Due to the perception of NT as a source of transformative innovations (the effects of which may be enhanced through convergence with bio, info-, and cognitive technologies), the governments of many countries have adopted national nanotechnology programs. Nano-bibliometrics, that arose in the West in the late 1990s, in the 2000s, became rapidly growing area of intensive research with a special focus on cross-country comparisons.

The article presents a comparative analysis of Russia and some other countries, active in the nano field throughout 2000-2014. Initial data (about 570 thousand nano publications)  were  obtained  from  the Science Citation Index Expanded database. It was analyzed using main bibliometric indicators in order to identify publication output, citation, and co-authorship links.

This research demonstrates that, despite the recession of hyperinterest, Nanotechnological field continues to grow. Due to unevenness of this growth it leads to significant changes in the global nanotechnology landscape, as exemplified by drift of center of the global nano research to the Asian region. Leading Western players more and more concede to Asian countries both in volume, and in scientific impact of the produced nano publications. In these terms, the United States has lost the lead under onslaught from China and Singapore, while South Korea actively attacks the German positions in international ranking. In its turn, latecomer Iran has taken, in 2014, the fifth place by publication output. Russia was not able to reach the set goal to become one of the world nano-leaders. The country's international competitiveness in the field is associated with a limited number of scientific directions, such as graphene research, nanobiomedicine, metamaterials for optics. Current results of the Russian nanotechnology policy are also discussed in connection with the completion of the Program of nanoindustry development in Russian Federation up to 2015.

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