Over at Metamodern, Eric Drexler just posted a rather impressive table of the top nanotech researchers of 2005, in terms of numbers of papers published.
The top four nanotech publishers are Chinese. China also grabbed slots 6-9, 11-13, and 15.
Slots 5, 10, 14, 16, and 17 are filled by researchers from Italy, England, Germany, Taiwan, and Germany, in that order.
Slots 18-23 are tied between Japan, the U.S., China (twice), and the Netherlands (twice).
Drexler comments that this table "has a degree of relevance" to an essay of his, “Asia and the elements of innovation”"
Of course, the number of papers published may always be correlated with the quality of the work. And nanotechnology is a broad collection of barely-connected fields, with no indication of which fields these authors are publishing in. But still... it surprised me to see the US so far down on a tech-related list.
(I'd include the table in this post, but Typepad seems not to allow linking to external images. My only way to show the image would be to copy the image to Typepad, which would be a copyright violation - an actual crime - instead of mere linking, which may be rude depending on how it's done, but as far as I know isn't illegal yet. Anyway, click on the link above to see the table.)
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