Nanoscience in Action: Unveiling Emerging Trends in Materials and Applications

Since their inception in the early 1960s, the use of nanoscale materials has progressed in leaps and bounds, and their role in diverse fields ranging from human health to energy is undeniable. In this report, we utilize the CAS Content Collection, a vast repository of scientific information extracted from journals and patent publications, to identify emerging topics in this field. This involves understanding trends, such as the growth of certain topics over time, as well as establishing relationships among emerging topics. We achieved this by using a host of strategies including a quantitative natural language processing (NLP) approach to identify over 270 emerging topics and subtopics across three major categories─materials, applications, and properties─by surveying over 3 million documents spanning across two decades in the nanoscience landscape. This wealth of information has been condensed into several conceptual Trendscape maps and other data visualizations, providing metrics related to the growth of identified emerging concepts, and grouped into hierarchical classes, and the connections between them have been explored. Our extensive analysis taking advantage of an NLP-based approach along with robust CAS indexing provides valuable insights in the field that we hope can help to inform and drive future research efforts. In a series of interconnected papers, we will present our findings from this project, with a focus on four major applications of nanoscale materials─drug delivery, sensors, energy, and catalysis─to provide a more comprehensive and detailed picture of the use of nanotechnology in these fields.