The mechanism of research on nanostructures

A very intensive nanoscale research is going on worldwide with sometimes skyrocketting growth rates materialized in thousands of papers and patents, and a plethora of industrial applications, too comprehensive to enumerate here. Although a high amount of information on the knowledge accumulated in the various aspects of this new field is available in the literature, a detailed analysis of this literature was not available until recently. Quite surprisingly, since the remarkable development and fermentation of this young science is the ideal object of a similarly young other one for which Vassilij Nalimov coined the word "scientometrics". The present volume is a reprint of vol. 70, no. 3, 2007 of the journal Scientometrics and is intended to show the application of the ideas of Vassilij Nalimov and others to the new field of nanostructures research by a collection of papers written via a group of specialists of scientometrics. It aims at giving to all practitioners and researchers of the field of nanoscale research a quantitative insight into the mechanism of their own field looked at from an angle they were perhaps less aware of.