Combining backward- and forward-looking analysis to reveal national research strengths and international collaboration opportunities

Executive Summary

This proof-of-concept project explores a novel approach to identifying granular level insights into domestic and international research strengths in selected emerging technologies – photonics integrated circuits (for quantum), quantum computing and engineering biology.

The project aims to distil key barriers and challenges from existing forward-looking strategic analyses, such as existing roadmaps, which are then used to analyse academic journal publications and patents. It thus improves understanding of how different search strategies and level of detail affect analysis and results with significant policy implications.

The results suggest that analysing academic publications at a more granular level changes the ranking of countries significantly, highlighting specific research strengths, which has strong implications for better understanding national comparative advantage and niche strengths as well as identifying international collaboration opportunities.

Aims and Policy Implications

This proof-of-concept academic research project explores and compares current and novel approaches to bibliometric and patent analysis. It aims to improve understanding of how different search strategies and level of detail affect analysis and therefore results and policy decisions.

Novel search strategies are also proposed, including the potential to 1) differentiate between science, applied science, engineering and manufacturing R&D strengths, 2) combine backward-looking bibliometric analysis with forward-looking roadmaps that identify key future challenges or stretch goals that can be added to keyword searches.

The project aims to benchmark countries with top academic publications based on the different search strategies and level of detail to understand the impact of the approaches. This could potentially inform domestic R&D strengths and comparative advantage, R&D collaboration opportunities and gaps between current technology development and future needs.