Vigilancia Tecnológica Aplicada a Nanociencia y Nanotecnología en Países de Latinoamérica

Abstract

Trends and last advances in science and technology require the application of modern tools and techniques to generate structured and useful knowledge. The present status and the dynamics of the information in the actual field can be accessed through processes of technological survey, capture, processing, analysis and visualization of information. With this purpose, we performed a scientometric study of the Chilean scientific production. Another Latin American countries and other three countries overseas were also taken into account as a reference to Chilean scientific reality. The study was lead by Dr. Patricio Vargas from the Physics department of the Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria. The study included the scientific productivity in indexed journals throughout the last 10 years. The searched areas were nanoscience and nanotechnology, constituting the knowledge-corpus that were analyzed and mapped with data mining tools. The main conclusion of this work is that the actual quantity of scientist working in nanoscience is insufficient to reach technological development in the near future. In order to design scientific policies in areas such as nanoscience and nanotechnology, as well as in other technological areas, one of the main recommendations that emerge from this work is that this kind of survey techniques have to be applied in a systematic and continuous way by the people involved in science and technology policy.