Delineating development trends of nanotechnology in the semiconductor industry: Focusing on the relationship between science and technology by employing structural topic model

The bibliometrics research on nanotechnology highlights close interrelationships between scientific and technological activities (S&T) in the field of nanotechnology. Notwithstanding abundant empirical evidence on the mutual relations between S&T, the dynamics of the relationship from a contextual perspective have gained relatively little attention. Accordingly, our understanding of how science- and technology-oriented nanotechnology identifies development opportunities from each other is still at a nascent stage. To address this gap, by focusing on nanotechnology in the semiconductor industry, we use structural topic model to empirically explore the dynamic interrelationships between science- and technology-oriented nanotechnology. We empirically delineate the dynamic development trends in the context of the interrelationships between S&T and demonstrate how development opportunities are identified from each other. These findings show a new window of opportunities for how state-of-the-art models for semantic analysis can be used in the literature on S&T interrelationships. •Potential development opportunities can be demonstrated by illuminating the contextual interrelationship between science and technology (S&T).•How S&T identifies development opportunities and how these interrelationships diverge are empirically delineated.•Some research subjects show consistent S&T interrelationships, whereas others fail to maintain such relationships.•This study proposes how the structural topic model (STM) can be used to empirically examine the diverging S&T interrelationship.