How inter-related are nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science?

What is it about?

The study looks at the relationship between four scientific fields that are called converging technologies, which are nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science. The study uses several methods including looking at shared concepts, shared journals, citation relations and joint authorship. it shows that the relationships between these four fields are not homogenous. The strongest relationship is between Nanotechnology and biotechnology, and also between nanotechnology and information technology. Cognitive sciences are not as integrated with the other three fields as they should be.

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Why is it important?

There is a lot of hope that converging technologies will help solve some of our complex problems, but we don't know if the converging technologies have actually converged or not and how integrated they are. This study tries to look into this matter.