Tag Archives: M. Fatih Yegul

China’s nanotechnology rise

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Eric Berger’s blog, SciGuy, recently highlighted some data about the number of nanotechnology/nanoscience articles published by Chinese researchers. You can see the entry and the table listing the world’s most prolific (overwhelmingly Chinese)  nanotech authors here. It’s interesting to contrast this data with a Nature Nanotechnology editorial from June 2008 where they had tables listing the countries with the most published nanotech articles and the most frequently cited articles. At the time, I thought China was under-represented although I don’t state it explicitly in my comments here.

Berger was inspired to write his commentary after seeing Eric Drexler’s posting on the topic (Oct. 30, 2009) but I’m directing you to Drexler’s followup comments where he provides some context for better understanding the statistics and cites sources that discuss the matter at more length.

The general consensus seems to be that some of China’s nanotech research is world class and the quality of majority of the research papers is either very good or improving rapidly.

There’s also this from the Center for Nanotechnology in Society University of California Santa Barbara (CNS-UCSB) paper, Chinese Nanotechnology Publications (scroll down the page to IRG 4-3 to read the full abstract),

China’s top-down and government-centered approach toward science and technology policy is succeeding in driving academic-publications output. By 2005 China had equaled or possibly surpassed the U.S. in terms of total output for academic/peer-reviewed publications, with a substantial increase in publication rate from around 2003. … We examined US and Chinese nanotechnology trends in the scientific literature and found that Chinese nanotechnology output is growing rapidly and will likely [outperform?] US output in terms of quality as well as quantity within a decade or less (Appelbaum & Parker 2008).

I include this portion of the abstract because  the phrase, “China’s top-down and government-centered approach to science and technology” points to something that’s not explicitly noted in the abstract, cultural and political climate. Nor was it noted in Bruce Alberts’ speech (in my Is science superior? posting) and as Inkbat noted in her comments to that posting. (My apologies to Mr. Alberts if he did make those points, unfortunately his speech is not available on the conference website so I’m depending on attendee reports.)

It’s a tricky matter trying to compare countries. China has more people and presumably more scientists than anyone else, all of which should result in more published articles if the area of research is supported by policy.

One of the issues for Canada is that we have a relatively small population and consequently fewer scientists. I commented on some work done by M. Fatih Yegul (in June 2008) where he contextualizes the number of Canadian articles published on nanotechnology and our focus on collaboration. Here’s part 2 of the series where I mentioned the numbers. (I did not post much material from Yegul’s paper as he was about to present it an international conference and it had yet to be published. I just checked today [Nov.4.09] and cannot confirm publication.)  My comments from part 3 of the series,

It’s all pretty interesting including the suggestion (based on a study that showed Canada as ranking 6th in numbers of science articles published from 1995-2005) that Canada is performing below its own average with regard to nanotechnology research.

I don’t know if the situation in Canada has changed since Yegul wrote and presented his paper but I strongly suspect it has not.

As for the roles that culture, social mores, history, and political environment play, I just can’t manage more than a mention in this posting in an effort to acknowledge their importance.

Do check out Rob Annan’s posting today (Nov. 4, 2009) about Science and Innovation in the wake of the 2009 Canadian Science Policy Conference.

Writer’s festival in Vancouver, a conference in Surrey, and a few nano odds and ends

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Vancouver’s annual writers and readers festival opens Oct. 21 and runs until Oct. 26, 2008.  I just bought a ticket for an Oct. 25 event, Femmes Fatales with Lisa Lutz, Leonie Swann, and Linda L. Richards talking about their murder mystery novels. I enjoyed both of Lutz’s books about the Spellman family, haven’t had a chance to read Richards’ book about a secretary (who’s the real brains of the operation) to a Depression era private investigator; and am not sure about Swann’s use of a herd of sheep as the detectives in her novel (still reading it). For more about about the festival and its events, go here.

There’s also a writer’s conference coming up in Surrey, BC, Oct. 24 – 26, 2008. This is for people who are serious about writing so a lot of it is shop talk. There are workshops, a trade show, book fair, editor/agent interviews (where you can sign up for a brief individual session), and more. For details, go here.

M. Fatih Yegul’s ( and co-authors M. Yavuz and P. Guild) paper analyzing the Canadian nanotechnology scene by examining the record of public scientific literature has been published. Publication details are avaialable at the IEEE Explore site. Information about the research is in my blog postings of June 17, 19, and 20, 2008. I recently heard from Martha Cook Piper’s assistant that Dr. Piper will be able to answer a few questions about her appointment (which occurred in April 2008) to the National Institute of Nanotechnology’s board  in early 2009.

Canada’s published nano articles (part 3)…patents

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The numbers of either articles or patents or both produced by one country or another suggest something about that country’s level of activity.  I am brutally summarizing some of M. Fatih Yegul’s data,  which will be presented at PICMET ’08 (www.picmet.org) in South Africa in late July and published in the proceedings under the title “Nanotechnology: Canada’s Position in Scientific Publications and Patents,” notes that Canada ranks 16th (just after Austria) in one study which examined global patent databases covering a 10 year period (1994 to 2004). That study listed the US as the leader with over 6700 patents while Canada registered slightly fewer than 100.

Two studies which focus on the patents filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) show Canada as ranking fifth overall. I guess a significant number of researchers don’t file their patents in the US hence the lower ranking when worldwide databases are used.  Interestingly, Canadians file more patents with the USPTO than they do with its Canadian counterpart.

There’s some information about the number of Canadian patents that get cited internationally, apparently we rank highly on that kind of an index especially with medical and biotechnology-related nanotechnology. (Aside: I love how the biotech guys are shifting their brand to nanotechnology. I’m not sure that’s going to help their problem, which is more profound than bad publicity associated with the old name.)

It’s all pretty interesting including the suggestion (based on a study that showed Canada as ranking 6th in numbers of science articles published from 1995-2005) that Canada is performing below its own average with regard to nanotechnology research.  There are no unequivocal conclusions to be had from all this data although I did get the impression that Canadians (whether you consider the level of scientific interest or government support) haven’t gotten that interested in nanotechnology yet.

Canada’s nano article numbers (part 2) plus memristor and L’Oreal updates

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Now for part 2 about M. Fatih Yegul’s (he’s at the University of Waterloo) paper which is to be presented in South Africa at PICMET ’08, July 27-31 (www.picmet.org or go here). PICMET will publish Yegul’s study in their proceedings if you want to check out his data.)

Yegul points out that nanotechnology or nanoscience didn’t actually exist as categories until after people started publishing and applying for patents which makes searching and analyzing data a little bit of a challenge. (I was really surprised to find out that the US Patent and Trademark Office took until 2004 before establishing nanotechnology as a category.)

As per Canadian publication output, we seem to bob around in the rankings between 8th and 13th worldwide, depending on the time period being examined and what the study was measuring.  Some of the studies are expressed in whole numbers while others provide percentages. Interestingly, we seem to range from 1% to roughly 4% when the studies express results in percentages.

A few countries,  the US, China, Japan, Germany, and South Korea dominate the numbers in some more recent studies.  (The 2008 Nature Nanotechnology publication analysis aggregated the European countries’ numbers which resulted in a high ranking overall but makes the study a little hard to compare to anything else. It’s a problem that I imagine Yegul confronted any number of times while producing his paper. )

I’ll look at the patents tomorrow in part 3 (I just can’t fit it all in today).

Now a few things I’d like to clarify…I’m a bit of a dullard and didn’t realize until two days ago that I’d gotten some responses to earlier postings…I hope both individuals will accept my apologies and since those comments were made weeks ago I thought it only fair to highlight them…first from Scott Jordan at Carpe Nano and in response to some confusion about memristors on my part:

  • “Thanks for the link to my blog, http://CarpeNano.blogspot.com. Think of the memristor as being like a resistor whose value changes with the current it has experienced flowing through it, and that its value “sticks” when no current goes through (that is, power off), and that the process is reversible. That’s not quite accurate, but the sticky behavior is the important part. It’s a way of storing information, and not just with the 0-or-1 states of conventional digital memory, though that’s one possible implementation. It can store intermediate values, too. That means one memristor can store multiple bit-states… in principle, one memristor could do the job of a whole conga-line of RAM elements. Fascinating stuff!”

Thank you, the explanation helped a lot.

Next, a comment from Andrew Maynard, Science Advisor for the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies (PEN) about their event “Small is Beautiful” which would have had Maynard and a L’Oreal scientist talking about nanotechnology safety and cosmetics from the European perspective. The talk which was to take place June 5, 2008 was postponed within a week of two studies (one about carbon nanotubes and the other about fullerenes) being released that occasioned a lot of online discussion about nanotechnology safety. (Maynard was one of the authors for the carbon nanotube study.) Here’s his comment:

  • “No hidden agenda here – our speaker from L’Oreal couldn’t make it for personal reasons. We are intending to reschedule as soon as possible – stay tuned!”

Thank you and I checked again this morning and unfortunately, they haven’t rescheduled yet.

Canada’s nano article numbers (part 1) and what happened to Martha Cook Piper?

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M. Fatih Yegul (University of Waterloo) sent me info. about  his latest paper titled: “Nanotechnology: Canada’s Position in Scientific Publications and Patents” in answer to my question about numbers of articles published by Canadian researchers (as per my June 12 posting about the June 2008 editorial in Nature Nanotechnology’s analysis of various countries). He’ll be presenting his paper at the PICMET ’08 Conference in South Africa (website is www.picmet.org or click here) which will be published in the proceedings afterwards.

Yegul provides a very nice description of nanotechnology and its brief history and summarizes some of the policy issues succinctly. His quotes from multiple sources pointing out that Canada lacks a national nanotech strategy or coordination of effort confirmed my dawning suspicions. (I’ve been trying to find something definitive about Canadian nano for the last 1.5 years but most of the material is out of date and scattered wildly over various websites.)

I’ll talk about the numbers (some of them) tomorrow as Yegul has sliced and diced through a number of studies about published articles and patents and as you’d expect there are competing methodologies and acronyms that are unfamiliar to me.

Meanwhile, there was an announcement about Martha Cook Piper’s appointment to the Board of Trustees of the [Canada] National Institute of Nanotechnology (NINT) in April 2008 (see here).  Strangely, she’s not listed on the NINT website. You can find her predecessor, Preston Manning still listed (here), but no Martha. In fact, if you visit the website newsroom (here), you’ll find there’s no mention of her appointment or news of any kind since Sept. 2007. Hmmm….