Alan L. Porter

Search Tecnology Inc.

This mini-review arrays the pertinent tools and purposes of “Tech Mining” – shorthand for empirical analyses of Science, Technology and Innovation (ST&I) data. The intent is to introduce the range of tools, and show how they can complement each other. Tech Mining aims to generate powerful intelligence to help manage R&D and innovation processes. We...

This paper introduces a new measure of patent value – Maintenance Renewal Score (MRSc) – reflecting assignee valuing the patent by paying successive renewal fees. We generate MRSc's for nanotechnology patents issued by the US Patent Office from 1999 through 2009, with US assignees and US inventors. Patenting increases over this period, coincident w...

COVID-19 has been an unprecedented challenge that disruptively reshaped societies and brought a massive amount of novel knowledge to the scientific community. However, as this knowledge flood continues surging, researchers have been disadvantaged by not having access to a platform that can quickly synthesize emerging information and link the new kn...

While the COVID-19 pandemic morphs into less malignant forms, the virus has spawned a series of poorly understood, post-infection symptoms with staggering ramifications, i. e., long COVID (LC). This bibliometric study profiles the rapidly growing LC research domain [5,243 articles from PubMed and Web of Science (WoS)] to make its knowledge content...

This study investigates the effect of regulatory uncertainty on the translation of scientific discovery on emerging research topics to technical applications in science-driven industry. Our empirical analysis using the case of the US Federal Drug and Food Administration’s release of the report on the regulatory approach to nanomedicine in 2007 show...

The devastating complications of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) result from an individual's dysfunctional immune response following the initial severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection. Multiple toxic stressors and behaviors contribute to underlying immune system dysfunction. SARS-CoV-2 exploits the dysfunctional...

Since the first Global Tech Mining (GTM) conference was held in Atlanta in 2011, the GTM conference has created a platform to connect tech mining researchers, exchange ideas and research progress, and promote collaborations. When it came to its 10th anniversary in 2020, COVID-19 forced the GTM conference into an online format. In tumultuous times f...

Covid-19 is an unprecedented challenge that disruptively reshapes societies and scientific research communities. Facing the knowledge flood brought by the overwhelming volume of research efforts, there still lacks a platform to link those to previous knowledge foundations and efficiently visualize and understand them. Aiming to fill this gap, we pr...

Technology development is a blend of inheritance and innovation that follows certain rules along a technology trajectory. This trajectory charts a technology's evolution and is among the best-supporting data for decision making. Technology life cycle (TLC) analysis, as one of the foundational topics in the field of technology management field, is o...

We periodically download the COVID-related research abstract records from PubMed. We then clean and consolidate various fields to help profile and access related research: - who? [is publishing related research -- institutions, authors; is funding related research]] - what? [topics being addressed] - where? [in which countries] - when? [publication...

The devastating complications of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‑19) result from the dysfunctional immune response of an individual following the initial severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‑CoV‑2) infection. Multiple toxic stressors and behaviors contribute to underlying immune system dysfunction. SARS‑CoV‑2 exploits the dysfuncti...

The technological convergence network (TCN) is an effective method to identify the advancement of technology convergence. However, the previous TCN investigations are limited to a single level of International Patent Classification (IPC) rather than different IPC hierarchies, which can only provide decision support for policy makers with one dimens...

Efforts to involve data science in policy analysis can be traced back decades but transforming analytic findings into decisions is still far from straightforward task. Data-driven decision-making requires understanding approaches, practices, and research results from many disciplines, which makes it interesting to investigate whether data science a...

The papers in this special section focus on the concept of "tech mining." Here, this term refers to the application of text mining tools to science and technology information, informed by the understanding of technological innovation processes. Since the 1st Global Tech Mining (GTM) Conference in 2010, the GTM community has established great connec...

Over the past two decades, the discovery of CRISPR-Cas immune systems and the repurposing of their effector nucleases as biotechnological tools have revolutionized genome editing. The corresponding work has been captured by 90,000 authors representing 7,600 affiliations in 126 countries, who have published more than 19,000 papers spanning medicine,...

In a competitive business environment, an early understanding of the dynamics of technological change is crucial to help policymakers and managers make better-informed decisions. Bibliometric analyses help in studying trends and technological evolution. Tech mining (text analyses of science and technology information resources) enhances Bibliometri...

The devastating complications of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) result from an individual’s dysfunctional immune response following the initial severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection. Multiple toxic stressors and behaviors contribute to underlying immune system dysfunction. SARS-CoV-2 exploits the dysfunctional...

How to evaluate or measure the emergence degree or level for a specific technology is rarely discussed in the prior studies, and it should be a valuable issue for the relevant areas on technology forecasting, foresight, and technological strategies for macro and micro economies, particularly for those emerging economies who are chasing the technolo...

Assessing corporate engagement with an emerging technology is essential for understanding the development of research and innovation systems. Corporate publishing is used as a system-level knowledge transfer indicator, but prior literature suggests that publishing can run counter to private sector needs for management of dissemination to ensure app...

Technological Forecasting and Social Change (TF&SC) is a leading international journal that publishes major advances related to technological forecasting and future studies. The journal was launched in 1969 and in 2019 celebrated its 50th anniversary. To celebrate 50 years of outstanding contributions, this study presents a bibliometric analysis of...

This paper puts forth a new indicator of emerging technological topics as a tool for addressing challenges inherent in the evaluation of interdisciplinary research. We present this indicator and test its relationship with interdisciplinary and atypical research combinations. We perform this test by using metadata of scientific publications in three...

The unprecedented, explosive growth of the COVID-19 domain presents challenges to researchers to keep up with research knowledge within the domain. This article profiles this research to help make that knowledge more accessible via overviews and novel categorizations. We provide websites offering means for researchers to probe more deeply to addres...

Technological Forecasting and Social Change (TF&SC) celebrates its fiftieth anniversary this year. The anniversary represents an appropriate time for an introspective analysis of the journal's history and impact. This study presents a bibliometric analysis of TF&SC in terms of how often TF&SC is cited by other journals (citation outflow), how often...

Abstract A degraded/dysfunctional immune system appears to be the main determinant of serious/fatal reaction to viral infection (for COVID-19, SARS, and influenza alike). There are four major approaches being employed or considered presently to augment or strengthen the immune system, in order to reduce adverse effects of viral exposure. The three...

We conducted a contest to predict highly active research topics. Participants analyzed ten years of Web of Science abstract records in a target technological domain (synthetic biology) so as to indicate cutting edge sub-topics likely to be actively pursued in the following two years. We describe contest procedures and results provided by thirteen p...

Uncovering the driving forces, strategic landscapes, and evolutionary mechanisms of China's research systems is attracting rising interest around the globe. One such interest is to understand the problem-solving patterns in China's research systems now and in the future. Targeting a set of high-quality research articles published by Chinese researc...

In response to the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, and the resulting COVID-19 pandemic, a global competition to develop an anti-COVID-19 vaccine has ensued. The targeted time frame for initial vaccine deployment is late 2020. The present article examines whether short-term, mid-term, and long-term vaccine safety can be achieved under such an accelerated sched...

The unprecedented, explosive growth of the COVID-19 domain presents challenges to researchers to keep up with research knowledge within the domain. This paper profiles this research to help make that knowledge more accessible via overviews and novel categorizations. We provide websites offering means for researchers to probe more deeply to address...

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and previous pandemics have been viewed almost exclusively as virology problems, with toxicology problems mostly being ignored. This perspective is not supported by the evolution of COVID-19, where the impact of real-life exposures to multiple toxic stressors degrading the immune system is followed by the SARS-Co...

Since March, 2020, in response to the COVID‑19 pandemic, many countries have been on lockdown (at different levels of severity), restricting many activities and businesses that involve gatherings of large numbers of people in close proximity. Currently (early June, 2020), countries across the globe are in different stages of easing lockdown restric...

Science and technology innovation is a critical determinant of a nation's competitiveness in the global economy and a key driver of wellbeing for its residents. Building research partnerships with other nations can create and sustain a lasting competitive advantage and facilitate the international transfer of knowledge and skills. While it is tempt...

Technology emergence has become a hot topic in R&D policy and management communities. Various methods of measuring technology emergence have been developed. However, there is little literature discussing how to evaluate the results identified by different methods. This research sharpens a promising Technology Emergence Indicator (TEI) set by assess...

Technological innovation is a dynamic process that spans the life cycle of an idea, from scientific research to production. Within this process, there are often a few key innovations that significantly impact a technology's development, and the ability to identify and trace the development of these key innovations comes with a great payoff for rese...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Scientometric methods have long been used to identify technological trajectories, but we have seldom seen reproducible methods that allow for the identification of a technological emergence in a set of documents. This study evaluates the use of three different reproducible approaches for identifying the emergence of technological novelties in scien...

Over 15,000 articles and reviews published since 2000 were collected, encompassing genome editing-related queries in the Web of Science . We used tech mining to investigate the underlying patterns that drive the adoption of genome editing, proposing an integrated research framework with bibliometrics, text analyses, and network analysis to analyze...

Identifying nanoscience and nanotechnology (nano) publications in global databases is essential to profile and track research in this ever-changing field. Crafting an effective search query to retrieve as many nano-related publications as feasible, while excluding irrelevant publications, is challenging. This paper reports on a major update to a we...

The increasingly uncertain dynamics of technological change pose special challenges to traditional technology forecasting tools, which facilitates future-oriented technology analysis (FTA) tools to support the policy processes in the fields of science, technology & innovation (ST&I) and the management of technology (MOT), rather than merely forecas...

We explore the contention that the seminal US National Academies consensus report, How People Learn (HPL), played a major role in bridging the flow of knowledge from Cognitive Science to Education. Our paper yielded four important results: First, HPL is, on a number of bibliometric measures, an unusually interdisciplinary work. Focusing on the fiel...

Identifying nanoscience and nanotechnology-related (nano) publications in global databases is essential to profile and track research in the ever-changing field. Crafting an effective search query to retrieve as many nano-related publications as feasible, while moderating irrelevant publications, is challenging. This paper reports on a major update...

This is a “bottom-up” paper in the sense that it draws lessons in defining disciplinary categories under study from a series of empirical studies of interdisciplinarity. In particular, we are in the process of studying the interchange of research-based knowledge between Cognitive Science and Educational Research. This has posed a set of design deci...

This study empirically examines the association between the extent of emerging technological ideas in a scientific publication and its future scientific impact measured by number of citations. We analyze metadata of scientific publications in three scientific domains: Nano-Enabled Drug Delivery, Synthetic Biology, and Autonomous Vehicles. By employ...

Many fields are managing better by incorporating advanced data analytics - e.g., even sports such as baseball. We illustrate with a novel set of indicators that distinguish cutting edge R&D activity to provide competitive technical intelligence on "who's doing what, where, and when." Our aim is to stimulate your thinking about what data analytics c...

In this paper we seek to better understand the relationship between forward diversity in the Cognitive Science and Educational Research literature, as well as what we call Border fields (i.e. those fields which exist at the intersection of Cognitive Science and Education Research). We find a clear and convincing relationship between forward and bac...

Purpose The ability to identify the scholarship of individual authors is essential for performance evaluation. A number of factors hinder this endeavor. Common and similarly spelled surnames make it difficult to isolate the scholarship of individual authors indexed on large databases. Variations in name spelling of individual scholars further compl...

Technology and innovation policy has been the core of economic development since the 1950s. Moreover, the increasing rate of technological developments allowed policy and strategy makers to think about technology emergence for proactive planning. In this sense, technological emergence became popular with different applications and foresight studies...

In past two decades, global data centres had become a major sector of energy consumption. In 2010, the consuming power of global data centres accounted for about 1.5% in the global electricity; however, by 2020, it was estimated that the power consumption of global data centres will account for over 8% of the global power usage. Although many outst...

There has been much research concerning emergence in technology, ever since knowledge has been accepted as a prime engine of economic growth. However, even though there are a growing number of publications, the concept remains ambiguous. In this study, we aim to trace emergence discussions to find the evolution of related concepts, in order to expl...

This study explores the patterns of exchange of research knowledge among Education Research, Cognitive Science, and what we call “Border Fields.” We analyze a set of 32,121 articles from 177 selected journals, drawn from five sample years between 1994 and 2014. We profile the references that those articles cite, and the papers that cite them. We ch...

Technological Convergence (TC) reflects developmental processes that overlap different technological fields. It holds promise to yield outcomes that exceed the sum of its subparts. Measuring emergence for a TC environment can inform innovation management. This paper suggests a novel approach to identify Emergent Topics (ETopics) of the TC environme...

Topic extraction presents challenges for the bibliometric community, and its performance still depends on human intervention and its practical areas. This paper proposes a novel kernel k-means clustering method incorporated with a word embedding model to create a solution that effectively extracts topics from bibliometric data. The experimental res...

Clinical translation of scientific discoveries from bench to bedside is typically a challenging process with sporadic progress along its trajectory. Analyzing R&D can provide key intelligence on advancing biomedical innovation in target domains of interest. In this study, we explore the feasibility of using a streamlined tech mining approach for id...

A new bibliometric technique enables one to distinguish high emergence topical content. This technique can be applied to sets of research publication abstracts reflecting a given technical domain (here, nanotechnology) to score cutting edge research terms. The resulting high emergence terms warrant special consideration in setting R&D priorities. T...

As one of the most impactful emerging technologies, big data analytics and its related applications are powering the development of information technologies and are significantly shaping thinking and behavior in today's interconnected world. Exploring the technological evolution of big data research is an effective way to enhance technology managem...

Accurately evaluating opportunities in new and emerging science and technologies is a growing concern. This study proposes an integrated framework for identifying a range of potential innovation pathways and commercial applications for solid lipid nanoparticles – one particularly promising contender within the field of nano-enabled drug delivery. S...

Indicators of technological emergence promise valuable intelligence to those determining R&D priorities. We present an implemented algorithm to calculate emergence scores for topical terms from abstract record sets. We offer a family of emergence indicators deriving from those scores. Primary emergence indicators identify “hot topic” terms. We then...

Purpose: This paper presents findings of a quasi-experimental assessment to gauge the research productivity and degree of interdisciplinarity of research center outputs. Of special interest, we share an enriched visualization of research co-authoring patterns. Design/methodology/approach: We compile publications by 45 researchers in each of 1) the...