By the time this article goes live on the web Nature Nanotechnology will have published 94 letters and 55 articles reporting the results of original research carried out at laboratories around the world. Browsing through the different subject categories in the journal's archive, it can be seen that the most popular categories include 'electronic properties and devices' and 'nanobiotechnology'. Further browsing will give the clear impression that researchers from the United States dominate the world of nanotechnology, with a number of countries vying for second place, quite some way behind. Indeed, when the papers published so far in Nature Nanotechnology are classified according to the country in which the corresponding author was based at the time, we find that 47.6% of them come from the US, followed by 8% from the UK, 7.4% from Japan and 6.7% from Germany.

Classifying papers according to the affiliation of the corresponding author is clearly an approximation, but given the fact that papers can contain ten or more authors with affiliations in three or more countries, it is necessary to make such approximations if we want to understand which areas of the world are strongest in nanoscience and technology. Indeed, a recent study of a much larger sample of nanotechnology papers found that this 'first-author approximation' was fairly reliable.

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