From Research to Industry: A Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis of Science-Technology Transferences and Emergence Patterns in Bioremediation

Abstract

This article uses text mining techniques to determine the time lag of knowledge transfer between research activity and technology development in bioremediation, complementing these with advanced visualization techniques in order to extract patterns that could be of interest for decision making in this field. The emergence patterns in this field have been identified and a method based on subject-action-object (SAO) semantic structure is proposed for characterizing such patterns, using 2-word tuples. Our results show that technology developments in heavy metal bioremediation swiftly follow scientific advances, as opposed to developments in bioremediation of organic chemical components. The science mapping reveals three distinct areas: 1) heavy metal remediation and phytoremediation; 2) aerobic and anaerobic remediation of chemical elements; and 3) bioremediation techniques for treating specific contamination sources such as oil. The emergence analysis points at activities involving energy recovery by bioremediation, and shows an increasing amount of technologies involving specific strains of microorganisms, which could gain significant traction in this field in an estimated time horizon of ten years. Our SAO approach, tested on the data sample corresponding to these strains, proves to be useful for characterizing the emerging technologies when applied to instrumental concepts.