A collective and abridged lexical query for delineation of nanotechnology publications Morteza Maghrebi • Ali Abbasi • Saeid Amiri • Reza Monseﬁ • Ahad Harati Received: 29 March 2009 / Published online: 3 November 2010 Ó Akade ´miai Kiado ´, Budapest, Hungary 2010 Abstract In order to monitor articles/patents in nanotechnology, there is little agreement on a universal lexical query or even an explicit deﬁnition of nanotechnology. Here in the light of a proposed deﬁnition, a set of case studies has been conducted to remove keywords which are not exclusive to nanotechnology. This resulted in a collective and abridged lexical query (CALQ) for nanotechnology delineation. Through bibliometric quantiﬁcation of already-proposed as well as the novel keywords, it was shown that all keywords included in CALQ have considerable exclusive retrieval and precision, while the removed keywords do not satisfy either of these numerical thresholds. This approach may also be applied for the future updating of CALQ. Keywords Nanotechnology  Lexical query  Bibliometric study  Delineation Introduction There are frequent reports of an emerging ﬁeld of science and technology which is commonly called Nanotechnology nowadays. Nanostructured materials/systems are believed to have numerous advantages over their counterparts (Hiramoto et al. 2006), Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s11192-010-0304-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. M. Maghrebi (&) Chemical Engineering Department, Faculty of Engineering, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, P. O. Box 91775-1111, Mashhad, Islamic Republic of Iran e-mail: mmaghrebi@um.ac.ir A. Abbasi  S. Amiri Iranian National Nanotechnology Initiative, P. O. Box: 14395-1336, Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran R. Monseﬁ  A. Harati Computer Engineering Department, Faculty of Engineering, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, P. O. Box 91775-1111, Mashhad, Islamic Republic of Iran 123 Scientometrics (2011) 86:15–25 DOI 10.1007/s11192-010-0304-7