Focus on Material Science & Technology:
Report Overview
The new Global Research Report finds that materials science grew fastest among all physical sciences fields (including chemistry, physics and engineering) during the last three decades: materials science output grew twice as fast as other sciences globally. In recognition of the close ties between materials science and chemistry, the study was released to coincide with the International Year of Chemistry. The report reviews three specialties of exceptional current interest:
- Graphene research and its potential for a new generation of electronics;
- Metal organic frameworks and their possible application in energy storage devices; and
- Electrospun nanofibrous scaffolds for tissue engineering, which may be used for routine reconstitution and replacement of diseased or damaged organs.
Each of these topics has seen an enormous increase in research output during the last decade. The three topics are also significant because of their implications for global and national economies, offering potential revolutions in electronics, energy storage, and biomedical engineering.
Included in the study’s list of the top 20 research fronts from 2006-2010, by total citations, are the electronic properties of graphene, polymer solar cells, and multiferroic and magnetoelectric materials. These specialty areas and others in the list illustrate the multidisciplinary nature of the field, which extends into chemistry, physics, engineering, and biomedicine.
The Materials Science report also reveals the growing dominance of Asian nations in this field, with the continent’s contributions driving much of the subject’s growth. Asia now produces half the world’s papers in materials science, and China has become the largest single country producer, having overtaken Japan, then the USA, and soon will surpass the combined output of the EU-15 group of well established European nations. Papers in the United States are still cited twice as often as those from China, a reasonable indicator of their influence and significance. However, the gap in citation impact between Asia, on the one hand, and Europe and North America, on the other, is starting to close.
