Categorizing Science and Technology Across Articles, Patents, Doctoral Programs, and Industries

In our work on biotechnology, it was possible to track a relatively narrowly defined body of knowledge from its origins (largely in universities), to development of inventions represented by patents, to commercial applications in firms and ultimately into goods and service in the market place. Nanobank aims to define a similarly relative narrow but even more broadly interdisciplinary set of articles, patents, and firms with the affiliation and/or location of individual participants identified so far as possible. It is natural to want to compare activities in nanotechnology (or biotechnology) with those in other science and technology (S&T) areas, but in attempting to do so we learned that it was generally more difficult to find narrowly defined areas of science (categorizing articles and doctoral programs) that correspond to narrowly defined areas of technology (categorizing by patent classes) that correspond to narrowly defined areas of industry (categorizing by governmental or financial market definitions of industry).