Network Analysis on Green Technology in National Research and Development Projects in Korea

This study examined how green technology (GT) has evolved recently in the domain of national research and development (R&D) in Korea. The analysis considered social network analysis by using keywords of national R&D projects in environmentally benign (‘green’ in this paper) technologies. Data for analysis were collected from the R&D database of the National Science and Technology Information Service (NTIS). By selecting the official GT category in the NTIS’s database, we gathered 53,896 GT R&D projects from 2011 to 2016 inclusive. By constructing a co-occurrence matrix with keywords, we conducted a centrality analysis (including degree, closeness, betweenness centrality) and visualized the network matrix to display a cluster map. This study presents the following findings: (1) the chronical trends of GT R&D, (2) focused fields of GT R&D, (3) the relations between keywords and GTs, and (4) the characteristics and problems in GT R&D. The paper ends with suggested policy implications to boost national GT R&D and to develop GTs in the future.