Relationship between citation-based impact and size of Iran’s Nano Innovation System: A Scale-independent Approach

The aim of this article is to explore the power-law correlation between size of Iran Nano innovation system and their citation-based impact. For this reason, we analyze articles of Iran Nano innovation system based on Web of Knowledge database. The main questions for this study are: Does the distribution of citation on this innovation system follow the power-law distribution or not? And is there a power-law correlation between size of innovation system and citation-based impact? The method used in this research is a Scientometrics and use of power-law approach. The data of this research have been extracted from the web of knowledge databaseand based on the articles produced in Iran’s Nano innovation system. 4010 article were found and extracted into 145 unique organizations that participating in the producing of articles. R package was used In order to investigate the existence of the power-law correlation and identification of scale-invariance property in complex Nano innovation system of Iran. We use Monte-Carlo simulation and Pierson correlation test for analyzing power-law correlation between variables of this study. At the one side, results shows that size of complex innovation systems (number of articles) and their outputs(citation-based impact) follow power-law distribution and we can found scale invariance property. These properties are evidenced in the power law correlation between complex innovation systems’ citation-based impact and their size with a scaling exponent α ≈ 1.23. The results suggest citations to a complex innovation system tend to increase 2.34 times when the system doubles its size over time. At the other side, we found inverse Matthew effect between citations based impact and size of innovation system. Based on this results, it can be argued that Iran's Nanotechnology innovation system is a complex system and show the emergent property.