Jan Youtie

• PhD
• Managing Director at Georgia Institute of Technology

This paper maps research outcomes and identifies spillover effects at a US University Research Center (URC) that offers user facilities for nanotechnology research. We use scientometric and network science approaches to analyze measures of topical orientation, productivity, impact, and collaboration applied to URC-related Web of Science abstract pu...

A firm’s connections into its ecosystem influences its ability to innovate. Much research on innovation ecosystems has examined high technology firms and locations and has used interview, survey, or science and technology data methods. Our study focuses on a resource-based ecosystem—agri-food in a medium-sized region—and explores a novel method usi...

Identifying emerging technologies has been of long-standing interest to many scholars and practitioners. Previous studies have introduced methods to capture the concept of emergence from bibliographic records, including the recently proposed Technology Emergence Indicator (Carley et al. 2018). This indicator method has shown to be applicable to var...

This study contributes to the literature on accelerators which focuses on private sector accelerators by providing an analysis of an accelerator in the public sphere that works with early-stage, science driven applications, the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps program. The methodology is based on a comparison of the ability of the services del...

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...

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...

Entrepreneurial scholarship suggests that a small firm's ability to grow is a function of its capacity to sense and respond to changes in the market as well as the broader environment for the firm's goods and services. Developing detailed measures of internal capabilities at a large scale, however, is often hampered by limitations in the availabili...

The article examines administrative workarounds in the context of university research administration. The empirical results from 116 semi-structured interviews with academic researchers with active National Science Foundation awards are framed by a “Rules Response” model positing relationships among rules compliance requests, administrative burden,...

This Viewpoint essay examines university research administration and the use of software systems that automate university research grants and contract administration, including the automatic sending of emails for reporting and compliance purposes. These systems are described as "robotic bureaucracy." The rise of regulations and their contribution t...

This chapter examines similarities and differences between scientists’ and nonscientists’ views of synthetic biology and the factors that shape them, as well as limitations of available research and the need for more focus on the views of both groups. We combine data from a survey of researchers in synthetic biology and a nationally representative...

This Viewpoint essay examines university research administration and the use of software systems that automate university research grants and contract administration, including the automatic sending of emails for reporting and compliance purposes. These systems are described as "robotic bureaucracy." The rise of regulations and their contribution t...

This Viewpoint essay examines university research administration and the use of software systems that automate university research grants and contract administration, including the automatic sending of emails for reporting and compliance purposes. These systems are described as “robotic bureaucracy.” The rise of regulations and their contribution t...

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...

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...

Research universities are expanding their institutional research presence overseas through the creation of research centers, facilities and partnerships outside of their home countries. We argue that such international university research ventures (IURV) are a distinct type of intermediary node in global knowledge networks occurring at the intersec...

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...

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...

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...

en A frequent lament among researchers is that public policy makers should pay more attention to scientific and technical information (STI). If there is any single area where one might expect STI to be used in public policy making and agenda setting it is in science and technology policy. Many of the policy makers in science and technology policy a...

Encouraging innovation in manufacturing is of much interest in business and policy circles. One aspect of this emphasis on innovation is the assumption that innovation leads to tangible business outcomes that can sustain the competitiveness of industries and create jobs. This study examines the relationship between product and process innovation an...

The synthetic biology research community will influence the future development of synthetic biology and its emergence into the sociopolitical and regulatory arenas. Because of this influence, we provide a first look at those involved in the research field—their views regarding the field and interactions with the public—using a unique sample of Unit...

This paper looks at the creation of a network of researchers of social issues in nanotechnology and the role of the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University (CNS-ASU) in the creation of this network. The extent to which CNS-ASU is associated with the development of a research network around the study of social issues in nano...

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...

The process by which universities internationalize their education mission and adopt the 'third mission' of economic development in their local region is widely documented. However, little is known about how transnational educational campuses adopt research and economic development functions. This case study draws on interviews, historical document...

The ability to accurately identify scholarly authors is central to bibliometric analysis. Efforts to disambiguate author names using algorithms or national or societal registries become less effective with increases in the number of publications from China and other nations where shared and similar names are prevalent. This work analyzes the adopti...

This study examines the effects of receipt of business assistance services from the Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) on manufacturing establishment performance. The results generally indicate that MEP services have had positive and significant impacts on establishment productivity and sales per worker for the 2002 to 2007 period with some...

This paper examines how the concept of public values can be operationalized in an ongoing public initiative to stimulate innovation in an emerging technology. Our study focuses on Innovation Corps (I-Corps)—a program initiated in 2011 by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to accelerate the process of commercializing science-driven discoveries. T...

Encouraging knowledge flow between mutually relevant disciplines is a worthy aim of research policy makers. Yet, it is less clear what types of research promote cross-disciplinary knowledge flow and whether such research generates particularly influential knowledge. Empirical questions remain as to how to identify knowledge-flow mediating research...

International research collaborations are widespread, but few have studied those that reach the scale and scope of what we call international university research ventures (IURVs). In an IURV, a university sets up a formal and organizationally consolidated research relationship in a foreign country. This paper puts forward an institutionalization fr...

Synthetic biology is an emerging domain that combines biological and engineering concepts and which has seen rapid growth in research, innovation, and policy interest in recent years. This paper contributes to efforts to delineate this emerging domain by presenting a newly constructed bibliometric definition of synthetic biology. Our approach is di...

For decades, there have been calls for bringing the Cognitive Science literature and Educational Research literature into greater and more systematic contact, resulting in the publication of a number of influential papers and the launch of targeted federal funding programs around the turn of the century. This article explores the extent of the inte...

Interest in evaluating non-economic social outcomes of science and technology research has risen in policy circles in recent years. The interest in social impacts of research has not yet given rise to a great proliferation of useful, valid techniques for evaluating such impacts. This study presents detailed case studies of four US National Science...

Visual analytics has been increasingly used to help to better grasp the complexity and evolution of scientific and technological activities over time, across science and technological areas and in organisations. This chapter presents general insights into some important fields of expertise such as mapping, network analysis and visual analytics appl...

Often researchers are disappointed by the limited extent to which peer reviewed STEM research seems to contribute directly to high level public policy decision-making. However, does the perception of the limited use of formal scientific and technical information (STI) accord with empirical reality? How does the choice of various types of informatio...

Scholars and policy-makers have expressed concerns about the crediting of coauthors in research publications. Most such problems fall into one of two categories, excluding deserving contributors or including undeserving ones. But our research shows that there is no consensus on "deserving" or on what type of contribution suffices for co-authorship...

Publishing is central to the academic reward system. Contributorship issues loom large in this context. The need for fairness in authorship decisions is upheld in most collaborations, yet some collaborations are plagued by “nightmare” issues ranging from inappropriate authorship credit to author order issues to exploitation of students and postdocs...

Tang, L., Youtie, J., and Shapira, P. “Is there a clubbing effect underlying Chinese research citation increases?” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 2015, 66, 9, 1923-1932. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/asi.23302 [Open Access]. Reprinted in Chinese and published in the China Academic Journal of Finance and Economics, 42...

Delineating the emergence of nanotechnologies that offer new functionalities is an important element in an anticipatory approach to the governance of nanotechnology and its potential impacts. This paper examines the transition to next generation active nanotechnologies which incorporate functions that respond to the environment or systems concepts...

Related Content: Balfour and Newbold (PAR September/October 2016)

Recent emerging technology policies seek to diminish negative impacts while equitably and responsibly accruing and distributing benefits. Social scientists play a role in these policies, but relatively little quantitative research has been undertaken to study how social scientists inform the assessment of emerging technologies. This paper addresses...

How do funding agencies ramp-up their capabilities to support research in a rapidly emerging area? This paper addresses this question through a comparison of research proposals awarded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) in the field of Big Data. Big data is characterized by its si...

The 87 Research Areas and Their Corresponding Codes of NSFC. (DOCX)

Raw Data of Big Data Proposals Funded by NSF and NSFC. (XLSX)

In the present study, we aim to quantitatively investigate and compare the intellectual landscapes of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) and multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) research between 2000 and 2014. The overall intellectual structure of these fields is illustrated by emerging trends of bursting keywords and thematic concentrations...

While broad “Triple Helix” frameworks of industry, government and university collaborations have the potential to enhance innovation and economic development at macro-levels, at the micro-level of the firm it should not be assumed that such relationships are uniform in character or outcomes. Each firm will negotiate and develop its own set of relat...

In this study, we combine the specialization scores for publications and patents (the latter is a new indicator of cross-disciplinary engagement) to achieve more comprehensive navigation of the innovation trajectory of a technology. The patent specialization score draws upon counterpart research publication indicator concepts to measure patent dive...

2016 report of the Georgia Manufacturing Survey (GMS) - a statewide study conducted every 2-3 years by Georgia Tech's Enterprise Innovation Institute and the School of Public Policy to assess the business and technological conditions of Georgia’s manufacturers. The theme of GMS 2016 is smart manufacturing.

EDITOR'S SUMMARY Focusing on graphene, a material made from carbon atoms, researchers constructed a map illustrating the material in the context of scientific developments and patent activity over time. Two basemaps reflecting general science and patent activity were created, in addition to two overlay maps reflecting scientific publication and pat...

Bibliometric and “tech mining” studies depend on a crucial foundation—the search strategy used to retrieve relevant research publication records. Database searches for emerging technologies can be problematic in many respects, for example the rapid evolution of terminology, the use of common phraseology, or the extent of “legacy technology” termino...

We present a meta-analysis of BigData research activity since 2009. Our purpose here is to present “tech mining” (bibliometric and text analyses of research publication abstract record sets) to provide a research landscape of who is doing what, where, and when. Our larger purpose is to help Forecast Innovation Pathways for big data & analytics over...

Websites offer an unobtrusive data source for developing and analyzing information about various types of social science phenomena. In this paper, we provide a methodological resource for social scientists looking to expand their toolkit using unstructured web-based text, and in particular, with the Wayback Machine, to access historical website dat...

This technical note analyzes international experiences and practices of public technology extension service programs. Technology extension services comprise varied forms of assistance provided directly to enterprises to foster technological modernization and improvement, with a focus on established small and mid-sized enterprises. The note discusse...

There is increasing evidence that citations to Chinese research publications are rising sharply. A series of reasons have been highlighted in previous studies. This research explores another possibility—whether there is a “clubbing” effect in China's surge in research citations, in which a higher rate of internal citing takes place among influentia...

This work examines the effects of receipt of business assistance services from the Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) on manufacturing establishment performance. Several measures of performance are considered: (1) change in value-added per employee (a measure of productivity); (2) change in sales per worker; (3) change in employment; and (4)...

With growing attention to societal issues and implications of synthetic biology, we investigate sources of social science publication knowledge in synthetic biology and probe what might be learned by comparison with earlier rounds of social science research in nanotechnology. “Social science” research is broadly defined to include publications in c...

In the emerging technology domain of nanotechnology, a significant portion of small and midsize enterprises have contributed to the scientific literature by publishing their research and development results. However, while considerable attention has been paid to patenting by small and midsize technology firms, the underlying business motivations fo...

The scant literature on individual scientists collaboration dynamics is used to develop a provisional model of research collaboration effectiveness. It incorporates external, collaborator, and team management factors, forming the basis for our theoretically informed qualitative analysis. We use this provisional model to guide semi-structured interv...

One of the impact promises associated with nanotechnology is that it will facilitate greener and more sustainable economic growth. We explore the extent to which nanotechnology development and commercialization is achieving this goal, drawing on secondary sources and available data. After defi ning the concepts of nanotechnology and green and susta...

This work examines the effects of receipt of business assistance services from the Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) on manufacturing establishment performance. Several measures of performance are considered: (1) change in value-added per employee (a measure of productivity); (2) change in sales per worker; (3) change in employment; and (4)...

This paper presents a new global patent map that represents all technological categories, and a method to locate patent data of individual organizations and technological fields on the global map. This overlay map technique can support competitive intelligence and policy decision-making. The global patent map is based on similarities in citing-to-c...

Over the last two decades, nanotechnology has not only grown considerably but also evolved in its use of scientific terminology. This paper examines the growth in nano-prefixed terms in a corpus of nanotechnology scholarly publications over a 21-year time period. The percentage of publications using a nano-prefixed term has increased from Keywords:...

Co-authorship has become common practice in most science and engineering disciplines and, with the growth of co-authoring, has come a fragmentation of norms and practices, some of them discipline-based, some institution-based. It becomes increasingly important to understand these practices, in part to reduce the likelihood of misunderstanding in co...

The extent to which an article attracts citations has long been of interest. However, recent research has emphasized not just the receipt but also the pacing of citation. Citation speed has been shown to be affected by journal prestige and self-citation but also public funding of research. Amidst these viewpoints, this paper explores the speed of a...

This research probes the configuration of technological systems in terms of inter-sectoral knowledge and intermediate goods exchanges based on a case study of 21 industry sectors in the economy of Malaysia. The case study draws on a network analysis of sectoral knowledge flows survey data and input–output exchange statistics. The results show that...

The purpose of our study is to review and synthesize the rapidly evolving literature on technology transfer effectiveness. Our paper provides a lens into relatively recent work, focusing particularly on empirical studies of US technology transfer conducted within the last 15 years. In doing so, we update and extend the Contingent Effectiveness Mode...

Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) are an important but unstudied aspect of nanotechnology's evolution. This paper uses case review and bibliometric analysis to examine 20 M&As involving acquired firms in the nanotechnology domain. The guiding proposition is that acquired firms provide complementarities to the acquiring firms. Key measures given consi...

With the building and construction sector contributing significantly to global greenhouse gas emissions, there is great demand for resource- and energy-efficient construction materials. Manufactured nanotechnology products (MNPs) are expected to realize resource and energy efficiency through performance improvements in the strength, lightness and i...

Science is increasingly organized in large-scale science centers. Expectations are that center-based research should yield qualitatively different research than single-investigator-produced research, but demonstrating the particular effects of a center is challenging. The notion of 'centerness' is that science centers can yield findings that reflec...

We explore pilot web-based methods to probe the strategies followed by new small and medium-sized technology-based firms as they seek to commercialize emerging technologies. Tracking and understanding the behavior of such early commercial entrants is not straightforward because smaller firms with limited resources do not always widely engage in rea...

Bibliometric analysis of publication metadata is an important tool for investigating emerging fields of technology. However, the application of field definitions to define an emerging technology is complicated by ongoing and at times rapid change in the underlying technology itself. There is limited prior work on adapting the bibliometric definitio...

Graphene is a novel nanomaterial consisting of a single layer of carbon atoms. It has attracted significant attention due to its distinctive properties, which include great strength, electrical and thermal conductivity, and lightness. While many diverse and exciting potential applications are discussed, the commercialization of scientific discoveri...