Feasibility study for an Estonian Materials Technology Programme

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Feasibility study for an Estonian Materials Technology Programme
2. Materials technology in Estonia
In total there are almost 1700 different people that have been listed as authors of these publications. A small
group of authors (30), however, are closely related to majority of the publications as they are mentioned as
one of the authors in more than 2/3 of all the listed publications. Based on inspection of these key authors, it
can be concluded that the strongest areas of materials science in Estonia are dealing with the following three
areas:
Fundamental physics: Solid state and condensed matter physics (Tartu University Institute of Physics)
Solar cells and related materials research (Tallinn University of Technology)
Electrochemistry (Tartu University Institute of Chemistry)
However, it must be noted that in general impact factor is a better measure for fundamental research than for
applied research, as applied research articles usually do not get as many citations. Measuring the excellence of
applied research is more difficult and should be looked at from technology transfer and industry perspective.
Broadly speaking, the impact factor is a good measure for journals in highly and frequently cited areas. It is
also not wise to compare journals across science areas (such as e.g. medicine and economics), as the citation
activity may differ. Also the length of the journal review process affects the impact factor: if the review process
is long, taking up to years, the impact factor will be lower as it takes time for the references to occur.
2.3.2 Research project funding data
In addition to scientific publications, a large amount of materials technology university level research projects
was inspected. A set of more than 550 projects was collected from the Estonian Research Information System
(ETIS) with the help of Archimedes Foundation. The set includes all projects starting from 1995 in the areas of
chemistry, physics, materials technologies, biotechnology and other fields closely related to materials. By far
the most active universities in these projects were the University of Tartu and Tallinn University of Technology
which corresponded to approximately 80% of all project volume. 25
Table 4. Characterisation of research projects in Estonia
Field of research Total project volume Largest contributors
Biotechnology 24M€ TUT (38%), UT (25%), EBC (17%),
TFTAK (13%)
Condensed matter physics 24M€ TU (65%), KBFI (30%)
Materials technology 23M€ TUT (51%), UT (45%)
Biochemical technology 8M€ UT (66%), TUT (19%), KBFI (12%)
Energy research 7M€ TUT (80%), UT (15%)
Physical chemistry 6M€ UT (58%), KBFI (31%)
Organic chemistry 5M€ TUT (56%), UT (46%)
Coatings and surface treatment 4M€ UT (57%), TUT (43%)
Analytical chemistry 4M€ UT (58%), TUT (42%)
Food and drink technology 4M€ TFTAK (72%), TUT (17%), UT (12%)
Technology of other products 4M€ TUT (77%), UT (23%)
Semiconductor physics 3M€ TUT (67%), UT (28%)
Bioenergetics 3M€ UT (92%)
Electronics 3M€ TUT (100%)
Microelectronics 3M€ TUT (100%)
25 Note: due to the database structure, no exact monetary volumes of projects can be given and thus all estimates in this section are
indicative only. All projects are assigned under one or more codes, which results in duplicate data entries.