A bibliometric investigation of research performance in emerging nanobiopharmaceuticals

The three important research domains, nanotechnology, biotechnology and pharmaceuticals, integratedly breed a promising multidisciplinary domain in the post-genomic age, which was recently defined by the term nanobiopharmaceuticals. In this paper, we firstly investigate its general development profiles, and then implement cross-country comparisons in its research performances, with the focus on the world share, relative research effort, impact and quality of five productive countries. Furthermore, from the science mapping perspective, we build the co-word and co-citation networks respectively for detecting its intellectual structure as well as evolution footprints of intellectual turning points. The growth examinations based on the datasets from WoS, MEDLINE and BIOSIS Review confirm the exponential growth of publications and citations in nanobiopharm-research. The cross-country comparisons show that USA is the leading country, and China is an up-and-coming contributor. The visual mapping structures by co-occurrence analyses show that nanobiopharm-research is currently focused on the drug development for improving biodistribution, bioavailability and pharmacokinetics, and the drug delivery for improving delivery of existing drugs. Some pivot publications is identified by CiteSpace, which work as structural holes, research fronts and intellectual bases for the nanobiopharm-research development in the given time window. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.