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    Highly Creative Nanotechnology Research: How Is It Defined and Organized
    (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009-10-02) Heinze, Thomas ; Rogers, Juan D. ; Shapira, Philip ; Youtie, Jan L.
    Scientific and technological progress is propelled by creative research. Creative research is also a prerequisite for advances toward addressing critical societal challenges. However, we know and understand little about how creative research is conducted. Moreover, much of our knowledge is focused on individual prominent scientist, particular renowned laboratories, or national level indicators. This partial and fragmentary nature of knowledge about creative research limits our ability to develop policies that can enhance organizational and institutional factors to support and encourage novel, ambitious, and valuable work. Research Questions This paper reports on a study which is investigating characteristics at the meso-level of the research setting which advance highly creative and exceptional research activities in nanotechnology. We also compare these results with another emerging research domain, which is somewhat less multidisciplinary and has a longer - albeit still emerging - history, human genetics. Several research questions to be addressed in this study will be probed in this paper, including the following. Is highly creative research associated with a pattern of career choices, such as, postdocs under specific mentors, experience in non-academic institutions prior to a tenure track job in a university, an early job at a highly prestigious institution or one already populated with highly creative researchers? Do highly creative researchers demonstrate more mobility than a comparison group in the early career stage? Do highly creative researchers have or develop a stable set of collaborators that allowed them to pursue risky projects or what seem to be far-fetched ideas? Or, similarly, are highly creative researchers more or better networked in some sense within the research community? Is there a direct association of highly creative research with publication productivity? Does the timing of creative events have a systematic pattern within their career? Will creative events be associated with affiliation in universities or industry research organizations that are larger and more oriented to multi-disciplinary activities and approaches to problems? Do highly creative researchers have more stable sources of funding during the period prior to the creative event? Methods The study builds on previous research into highly creative scientists in these two scientific fields in the U.S. and Europe (1). It examines institutional, organizational, team, and career development features and directions of this highly creative research through quantitative comparison approaches. An initial effort involved development of a comparison group for highly creative researchers, based on publication data from the Science Citation Index (SCI) through the Web of Science (WOS). These data were extracted according to definitions in Porter et al (2008), for nanotechnology, and Heinze et al (2007) for human genetics (2). The core analysis is centered on gathering and using curriculum vitae (CV) to measure and code information on institutional, organizational, and career development factors. Insights are offered for research management, research funding, and organizational designs to stimulate highly creative research. Preliminary Results Preliminary results have been focused on the complex task of developing a robust method for creating a matched comparison group for the highly creative researchers. One method that was explored is propensity score matching of highly creative researchers to a large random sample of researchers in the nanotechnology or human genetics domains based on propensity scores. In this case, the propensity score is the predicted probability of being categorized as an HCR conditional on a set of covariates. A second method matches researchers based several early career characteristics such as (1) first year of publication of the HCRs, (2) subject category of the first publication, and (3) publication volume for the first six years. In addition, continental (i.e. US or EU) affiliation was also taken into consideration. We have found that the second method yields results with greater face validity. The heterogeneity of the random sample of researchers in the comparison group does not lend itself to propensity score matching as a readily as it does to the second, more purposive, approach. Moreover, we observe that nanotechnology appears to have less heterogeneity with respect to our primary matching feature - citations per year (logged) - than does human genetics. The purposive approach has been used to form the basis for development of a set of 8 to 10 comparison researchers to ensure there is at least 1 comparison researcher CV for each of the highly creative researchers in nanotechnology and human genetics. These matched researchers have been contacted and more than 100 CVs have been obtained and added to our dataset of existing CVs of creative researchers. We anticipate coding and analysis of the data will be completed in the first half of 2009. 1) See: Heinze, T., Shapira, P., Senker, J., and Kuhlmann, S., "Identifying Creative Research Accomplishments: Methodology and Results for Nanotechnology and Human Genetics," Scientometrics, Vol. 70, No. 1, 2007, pp. 125-152. 2) Porter, A.L., Youtie, J., Shapira, P., and Schoeneck, D.J., Refining Search Terms for Nanotechnology, Journal of Nanoparticle Research, Vol. 10 (5), 715-728, 2008.
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    Locating Nanotechnology Among the Disciplines
    (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009-10-02) Porter, Alan L. ; Youtie, Jan L.
    Nanoscience and nanotechnology ("nano") has been described as the ultimate interdisciplinary research area. Mihail Roco and others have set forth policy discourse through their notion that nano enables the convergence of disciplines under the rubric of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive sciences ("NBIC"). However, some observers are more skeptical, suggesting that nano serves as a term for multiple, but perhaps unconnected, research endeavors. For example Schummer's (2004) analysis of 600 nanotechnology publications in 2002 and 2003 finds that research collaboration patterns in nanotechnology do not significantly differ from those of traditional disciplinary research and concludes that nanotechnology appears to be an aggregate of unconnected mono-disciplines.[2] Despite these polar positions, it is widely believed that understanding the nature and characteristics of disciplinary relationships within nano research is important, with the potential to influence science policy, research management, and the conduct of research. Research Question This paper will address two questions: (1) how broadly does nano engage various disciplines or research areas? And (2) to what extent does nanotechnology research integrate research knowledge from multiple disciplines? Methods This analysis is based on a bibliometric analysis of the journal subject categories (SCs) provided by Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). The data source used in this analysis draws on a set of nano publications that were identified using a multi-stage modular Boolean search strategy of Web of Science (WOS) Science Citation Index (SCI) publications from 1990 to 2008. This strategy is described in Porter et al (2008). [3] The multidisciplinary aspects of these publications are assessed through three approaches: (1) by placing them in an overlay map to the map of science developed by Leydesdorff and Rafols (2008) [4]; (2) by examining the SCs in the cited references of these articles, and (3) by examining how the multidisciplinary attributes of these nano publications compare to those of other traditional disciplines by using a measure of disciplinary integration which ranges from 0 (stand alone discipline that does not cite work from other disciplines) to 1 (highly integrated discipline that fully cites work from other disciplines). Preliminary Results A preliminary analysis of a sample of nano papers yields findings that both support and cast uncertainty on conventional beliefs about the interdisciplinary nature of nanotechnology. Initial results suggest that nano papers do in fact encompass a wide range of disciplines as measured by the journal SC. Moreover, we do find evidence of a considerable presence of multiple SCs in the cited references of samples of nano publications in our nano dataset. This finding suggests that nano researchers do possess considerable knowledge of research activities in multiple disciplines, and the findings of these activities inform and move their research forward. This conclusion is limited by the use of journal publications as the database, but it does indicate a future research direction in that qualitative and ethnographic studies of laboratory behavior could use multidisciplinary behaviors as a lense for examining nanoscientists' research activity. When we compare the multidisciplinary activity of nano to that of more traditional disciplines, using an integration score, we find that nano is highly multidisciplinary but so are other comparator disciplines. The exception is mathematics which appears to be more of a stand alone discipline that tends to cite other work in mathematics. In summary the results suggest that nano does possess multidisciplinary characteristics. However so many fields in science writ large. Recognizing and fostering these characteristics will be important for continued development of nanotechnology. [1] Roco, M. C., and Bainbridge, W.S. Converging technologies for improving human performance: Nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science (Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 2003); Roco, M. C. Journal of Nanoparticle Research 10 (1), 11-29 (2008). [2] Schummer, J., Multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and patterns of research collaboration in nanoscience and nanotechnology, Scientometrics, 59, 425-465 (2004). [3] Porter, A.L., Youtie, J., Shapira, P., and Schoeneck, D.J., Refining Search Terms for Nanotechnology, Journal of Nanoparticle Research, Vol. 10 (5), 715-728, 2008. [4] LEYDESDORFF, L. AND RAFOLS, I. (Forthcoming) A Global Map of Science Based on the ISI Subject Categories. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. Preprint [http://users.fmg.uva.nl/lleydesdorff/map06/texts/map06.pdf].
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    Blind Matching Versus Matchmaking: Comparison Group Selection for Highly Creative Researchers
    (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009-10) Rogers, Juan D. ; Shapira, Philip ; Youtie, Jan L.
    This research examines approaches for constructing a comparison group relative to highly creative researchers in nanotechnology and human genetics in the US and Europe. Such a comparison group would be useful in identifying factors that contribute to scientific creativity in these emerging fields. Two comparison group development approaches are investigated. The first approach is based on propensity score analysis and the second is based on knowledge from the literature on scientific creativity and early career patterns. In the first approach, the log of citations over the years of activity in the domains under analysis produces a significant result, but the distribution of matches is not adequate at the middle and high ends of the scale. The second approach matches highly creative researchers in nanotechnology and human genetics with a comparison group of researchers that have the same or similar early career characteristics were considered: (1) same first year of publication (2) same subject category of the first publication, (3) similar publication volume for the first six years in the specified emerging domain. High levels of diversity among the highly creative researchers, especially those in human genetics, underscore the difficulties of constructing a comparison group to understand factors that have brought about their level of performance.
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    Erawatch (European research area support)
    (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2006-05-01) Shapira, Philip ; Youtie, Jan L.
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    Change and innovation in Georgia manufacturing: a 10 year perspective
    (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2005) Shapira, Philip ; Youtie, Jan L. ; Hegde, Deepak ; Brice, Kathryn T.
    Small and medium-sized manufacturers in the United States are experiencing increasing challenges in today’s global economy. U.S. manufacturing employment declined by nearly 13 percent from 1998 to 2002. More than 2.25 million manufacturing jobs were lost during this time period. Ninety-eight percent of all manufacturers, or approximately 350,000 enterprises are small or mid-sized, having 500 or fewer employees. These enterprises account for over half of the value of U.S. industrial production, and employ about 10 million jobs or two-thirds of all U.S. manufacturing workers. These workers earn in excess of twice the wages of retail workers.