Interrelationships of technologies - the concept of home technology terms

International audienceNowadays technological progress and industrial innovation very often are induced by interdisciplinary research. As an example, applications of nanotechnology in biomedicine (Rojas-Chapana et al., 2006) combine research in many disciplines like physics, chemistry, microbiology, cell biology, and material science. In the cited case, all disciplines contribute to the design, synthesis and fabrication of biocompatible devices at the nanometer scale. Only little research has been performed to analyze interdisciplinary interrelation of technologies on the basis of research topics. The work of Morillo F., Bordons M., Gomez I. (Morillo et al., 2003) aimed to establish a tentative typology of disciplines by their degree of interdisciplinary research. They measured interdisciplinarity with indicators based on the multi-assignation of journals in subject categories, but not on the level of research issues like nanotubes, thin layers, etc. In this contribution, we introduce a methodology to analyze the interrelationship of technologies on the basis of keywords present in bibliographic records. We consider these terms are a representation of the research topics diffused by means of their publication in the scientific literature. Key questions are: How can we demonstrate the interrelations between technologies on the basis of research items? Do keywords that occur most often in articles assigned to a technology reflect research issues and do they show interrelationships