Visualization of nano risk research field to clarify domains year by year

Abstract

With rising interest of nano technology R&D, nano risk researches have been greatly studied recently. They attract much attention since influence of nano products in the society is not well-known. Now the current state of nano risk research field is not fully investigated, and the object is overviewing this structure until 2008 and predicting the direction of next-coming studies. Nano risk 1611 papers were searched out with certain query and further refinement. And these papers were clustered by bibliometric method. The selected papers were clustered to seven parts and visually seen as aggregated blocks. Each cluster was labeled with proper name by analyzing in detail and the content of each cluster was classified with three terms, i.e. "Material", "Hazard" and "Kinetics". The biggest cluster was cluster #0 "atmospheric nanoparticles", and secondly cluster #1 "nanoparticles used in imaging", thirdly cluster #2 "toxicity of manufactured nano materials". Furthermore, historical trend of the number of papers of each cluster was studied year by year. From the all results, short-term future predicting was performed by examining titles of papers or transition of the number of papers in each cluster and by watching the cluster position and gaps between clusters. © 2009 IOP Publishing Ltd.