Bibliometric analysis of micro-nano manufacturing technologies

Abstract

Manufacturing is the primary industry promoting economic and social development. For the past 30 years, the global trends of preciseness and device miniaturisation have promoted manufacturing to the micro (μ) and nano (η) scale. Identification of the most promising micro-nano manufacturing technologies (MNMT) is of interest to industry, academia and private and national science investing foundations. Considering the exponential broadening of the research area and an enormous volume of literature, providing an overview of the state of the art is far beyond the scope of a technical review paper. This study performs bibliometric analysis of a stream of academic literature devoted to μ- and η-machining. The main goals of the analysis are to assess the current core and trends in the field of MNMT. Literature and citation statistics from 1988 were collected from the Web of Science, Google Scholar, Scopus, Engineering Village, ScienceDirect and SpringerLink databases and were then analysed and illustrated with Microsoft Excel and VOSviewer software. The top keywords, articles, journals, authors, universities and countries were identified according to different parameters. The index of normalised influence was offered to evaluate the top element in each category. We observed that the most powerful keywords were present in well-known articles published in prominent journals by authoritative scientists at leading universities in the countries that are most actively engaged in MNMT. The implications of the research outcomes for investors and academicians are summarised in the conclusion.