Research diversification and impact: the case of national nanoscience development

Newcomer nations, promoted by developmental states, have poured resources into nanotechnology development, and have dramatically increased their nanoscience research influence, as measured by research citation. Some achieved these gains by producing significantly higher impact papers rather than by simply producing more papers. Those nations gaining the most in relative strength did not build specializations in particular subfields, but instead diversified their nanotechnology research portfolios and emulated the global research mix. We show this using a panel dataset covering the nanotechnology research output of 63 countries over 12 years. The inverse relationship between research specialization and impact is robust to several ways of measuring both variables, the introduction of controls for country identity, the volume of nanoscience research output (a proxy for a country’s scientific capability) and home-country bias in citation, and various attempts to reweight and split the samples of countries and journals involved. The results are consistent with scientific advancement by newcomer nations being better accomplished through diversification than specialization.