Nanoscale materials at work: Mapping emerging applications in energy, medicine, and beyond

Since their inception in the early 1960s, the use of nanoscale materials has progressed in leaps and bounds, and their role in diverse fields ranging from human health to energy is undeniable. In this report, we utilize the CAS Content Collection, a vast repository of scientific information extracted from journal and patent publications, to identify emerging topics in this field. This involves understanding trends, such as the growth of certain topics over time, as well as establishing relationships between emerging topics. We achieved this by using a host of strategies including a quantitative natural language processing (NLP) approach to identify 279 emerging topics and sub-topics across three major categories – materials, applications, and properties – by surveying roughly 3 million publications in the nanoscience landscape. This wealth of information has been condensed into several conceptual mind maps and other graphs that provide metrics related to the growth of identified emerging concepts, group them into hierarchical classes, and explore the connections between them. We delved deeper into four major emerging applications of nanoscale materials – drug delivery, sensors, energy, and catalysis – to provide a more comprehensive and detailed picture of the use of nanotechnology in these fields. In addition, we leveraged the CAS registry, consisting of over 250 million substances, to determine and discover substances across varied classes (such as polymers, elements, organic/inorganic molecules) and how they are utilized in the 4 major applications. Our extensive analysis taking advantage of an NLP-based approach along with robust CAS indexing provides valuable insights in the field that we hope can help to inform and drive future research efforts.