Nano language and distribution of article title terms according to power laws

Abstract

Scientometric evaluation of nanoscience/nanotechnology requires complex search strategies and lengthy queries which retrieve massive amount of information. In order to offer some insight based on the most frequently occurring terms our research focused on a limited amount of data, collected on uniform principles. The prefix nano comes about in many different compound words thus offering a possibility for such assessment. The aim is to identify the scatter of nanoconcepts, among and within journals, as well as more generally, in the Web of Science (WOS). Ten principal journals were identified along with all unique nanoterms in article titles. Such terms occur on average in half of all titles. Terms were thoroughly investigated and mapped by lemmatization or stemming to the appropriate roots—nanoconcepts. The scatter of concepts follows the characteristics of power laws, especially Zipf’s law, exhibiting clear inversely proportional relationship between rank and frequency. The same three nanoconcepts are most frequently occurring in as many as seven journals. Two concepts occupy the first and the second rank in six journals. The same six concepts are the most frequently occurring in ten journals as well as full WOS database, representing almost two thirds of all nanotitled articles, in both instances. Subject categories don’t play a decisive role. Frequency falls progressively, quickly producing a long tail of rare concepts. Drop is almost linear on the log scale. The existence of hundreds of different closed-form compound nanoterms has consequences for the retrieval on the Internet search engines (e.g. Google Scholar) which do not permit truncation.