Strategic Review of the Petrochemicals and Oil Processing Technology Landscape

“If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.” -- Dr. Carl Sagan (American Astronomer, Writer and Scientist, 1934-1996)

KACST-King Abdulaziz City of Science and Technology- commissioned Thomson Reuters to produce a report titled Strategic Review of the Petrochemicals and Oil Processing Technology Landscape.  The report, which is available for free download at http://www.kacst.edu.sa/en/about/publications/Other%20Publications/STRATEGIC%20REVIEW%20OF%20THE%20PETROCHEMICALS%20AND%20OIL%20PROCESSING%20TECHNOLOGY%20LANDSCAPE.pdf has so much to offer I hardly know where to begin.  So, I will begin with the obvious.  Its primary purpose is to help Saudi Arabia position itself strategically within this global industry.

Using bibliometrics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliometrics), the authors of the report determine which entities produce the most peer reviewed papers in each of 40 technology categories.  They do the same for patents.

Table 20 of the report lists the top five entities in each technology in the peer reviewed paper realm. Interestingly, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (http://english.cas.cn/) is the top producer in 28 of the 40 technologies.

Table 37 lists the top five assignees of patents in each category.  The top two entities in all categories combined are China Petrochemical Co Ltd. and China Petro-Chem Corp., followed by UOP in the U.S., and Japan's Sumitomo Chemicals.

For a bibliographic researcher, this is gold.  I can use these lists to focus my search on the organizations most likely to produce results in any given category.

Table 5 lists the total papers produced from 1995-2011 in each of the 40 categories.  The top two are …

Petrochemicals Synthesis - Processes – Polymerization
Petrochemicals Synthesis - Processes - Oxidation

The keywords suggested by Table 5 are extremely useful in focusing my research in such a way as to produce fruitful results.

In this post I have just scratched the surface in tips on how to mine this resource.  Take a look at it, and let me know what you think.