Oral The Influences and Interactions Between various Scientific Research and Technological Domains in case of Canadian Nanotechnology

Abstract

In today’s world, relationship between domains of science and technology is getting stronger as science contributes to technologyin different ways. The interaction between scientific and technological domains is happening in complex innovation processesin which new technological ideas emerge as a result of new discoveries in science. This research aims to investigate interactionsbetween various emerging scientific and technological domains and their influences in the development of both patents andpublications in the field of nanotechnology.The study uses real data of the journal articles and patentsin nanotechnology between 1995 and 2008 which we clusteredinto scientific and technological domains. In clustering phase, terms and phrases were located in each record using singularvalue decomposition algorithm and then documents were assigned to cluster labelsby applying standard vector space modelalgorithm on them.To achieve our research goals, in next step, we built the network of nanotechnology article-patent citationsand investigated various network topological parameters over all nodes. The patent-article network is built on citation linksamong different nodes of patents and articles, while patent nodes cite a set of NPLs (Non-Patent Literature) and NPLs are alsociting another set of articles as their references. Focusing on the role of NPLs, we studied trend of network topological parameterslikebetweenness centrality and degree centrality while looking at correlation between them. We highlighted leading patents intechnology and leading articles in NPLs and their cited articles set which could be seeds of innovation in nanotechnology.Our main results of this research are focused on the role of NPLs as gate-keeper nodes in bridging ideas from scientific totechnological domains. Comparing NPL citation counts to articles and patents, results show higher range of NPLs’ contributionto the development of scientific fields than technological domains in Canadian nanotechnology. We also highlighted mostcited and citing NPLs nodes of article-patent citation network as significant nodes in connecting science and technology. Usingaverage of citations per article metric, we calculated the rate in which different technological domains influenced by scientificNPLs and also the impact of NPLs on development of different scientific and technological domains. Regarding the contributionof top cited NPL articles in development of scientific domains, we discovered a positive correlation between citation count andbetweenness centrality measure of articles, which indicates the more an article is cited by patents and other articles, the moreinfluence it has on the transfer of ideas from scientific to technological domains. We also observed thatcitation count value ofjournals in our citation network has a positive relation with the number of scientific domains it contributes to. In addition, wediscovered the positive relation between patent citations count and journal’s impact factor. This is interesting to us since wecan see the more articles of a specific journals are cited by patents, the more impact factor the articles of that journal have. Inother words, impact factor not only shows the impact of articles on development of scientific domains, it also shows how thearticles of a journal have impact on development of technological domains.Regarding the NPL’s contribution to development oftechnological domains, we found a positive relation between NPL journals’ citations to technological clusters and the numberof technological clusters they cover. Results showed the increasing trend of journals’ contribution to different technologicaldomains as citation count value of journals increases.It is worth to mention that this study is the first to examine the flow of ideas from scientific to technological fields whichuses a citation network of both patent and article nodes,and investigating leading articles and patents which play a crucial rolein keeping this knowledge flow alive in nanotechnology related sub-fields.