Realizing the Promise--The Development of Research on Carbon Nanotubes.

The present reflection on the development of research on carbon nanotubes (CNTs) stems from the publication of the report "Realizing the Promise of Carbon Nanotubes" by the US National Nanotechnology Initiative in 2015. The report is a critical assessment of the state-of-art of CNT research and highlights some unresolved issues related with this field. Starting from the results of this assessment, we carried out an analysis of the publications' pool in CNTs and related domains, by exploiting bibliometric tools.