KNOWLEDGE EVOLUTION IN NANOCHITOSAN RESEARCH AND INNOVATIVE BIOTECHNOLOGICAL APPLICATIONS: A MULTINATIONAL ASSESSMENT FOR NOWCAST AND FUTURE FORECAST

There had been a growing global need for biomolecular agents due to its diversity in biotechnological application especially chitosan and its derivatives. Current advances in nano-particulate technologies have also abetted the use of biomolecular-based nano-type delivery and functions of chitosan resulting nano-based chitosan/nanochitosan particle. Although there exist notable advances in the exploration and innovative nanochitosan application, future expansion remains bleary. The current study access the knowledge evolution in nanochitosan research and innovative biotechnological applications via science mapping of previous studies from authors, institutions, countries, collaboration networks, and productivity. Retrieved documents were 5,923 with 13,327 authors, from Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection and timespan of 1990 – 2019 using the search title; (Chitosan and nanoparticle*). Our result reveals an increase in the publication of related documents in fifth yearly order. This notable/significant increase observed in subsequent years was revealed by the Lotka’s model with an annual growth rate of 33.32%; Lotka's model beta=1.927; C=0.286; R2=0.89; p.value=0.05. Corresponding Author's Countries were China 1756 (29.65), India 683 (11.53), Japan 47 (0.79); while country citation are; China (51720), India (17595), Korea (10688), Australia (1679). The last decade reports reveal more publications on nanochitosan studies ranging from 238 publications to greater than 746 publications. Although such increase has revealed global known capabilities, research based and/or application of the nanobased-chitosan, there is need for pertinent exploitation of nanochitosan potentials, documentation, application, progresses and future of related studies. A suggestive continuous application of such progresses on chitosan knowledge-research based documentation/exploration has a part with global future research and biotechnological application.