Assessing The High-Impact Contributions Of Foreign-Born Scientists To Nanotechnology Innovation

Existing research has noted the impact of foreign-born scientists to high-growth, cutting edge fields such as bio- and information technology.  However, little has been done to extend this research into the emergent field of nanotechnology.  To this end, our research employs an original data-set to examine the nativity of scientists making significant contributions to nanotechnology research and innovation.  Scientists were considered to have made high-impact contributions to the field if they had either corresponding authorship or multiple authorships in the top 1% of nanotechnology related articles of the years 1999-2009 ranked by number of citations.  Using multiple sources, we were able to determine the country of origin of 65.6% of our population of 360 scientists.  Aggregate and yearly figures were benchmarked against the prevalence of the foreign-born in both the American scientific labor force and general population.  We find that overall, and for each year in our study, scientists making high-impact contributions to nanotechnology innovation were disproportionately foreign-born; this relationship is proved to be statistically significant in all but one year.  We also find that, percentage-wise, the amount of foreign-born contribution has steadily climbed every year, along with the number of highly-cited articles regarding nanotechnology.  Our results provide new data on a significant, but largely unstudied phenomenon and promise to contribute to studies on highly-skilled migration and its links to America’s economic competitiveness.