A new approach to quantifying the structure of our industry and its impact further demonstrates the underlining nature of photonics
The approach first looks for the most frequent technical terms in more than a decade of 0.5 million photonics publications from SPIE. On the assumption that SPIE publications are representative of photonics and only the most useful terms relevant to enabling the innovation are included in a publication, the result is the first ranked quantitative photonics taxonomy. The most common terms used being optics (40%), imaging (26%), lasers (19%), material (16%). As innovation inexorably makes it way to products over time and the relative ranking of these terms has not significantly changed in two decades this explains the structure of our industry. The optics, imaging laser and materials, and other high ranking components, are the core building blocks of photonics.
On the further assumption that economic value flow proportionally to component impact, this also provides a proxy for sizing the different photonics component segments. For example, the analysis indicates the laser segment is value at ~$26 billion as a share of the $345 billion photonics component segment updated by SPIE in 2025.
Having established a core photonics taxonomy based on terms actually used by photonics innovators, it possible to see how frequently these same terms appear in all global publications in all fields. 160 million global publications across all sciences and humanities, over the last 35 years were searched through OpenAlex[i] to see how frequently photonics terms were included. Overall 13%, ~21 million academic articles, include a photonic term such as optics, lasers, spectroscopy etc in the article text. Optical imaging has the biggest impact, followed by laser and spectroscopy.
As a bottom up analysis based on identifiable peer reviewed publications which represent 35 years of research, this indicates photonics underpins 13% of global innovation. This fraction has been stable overtime. Whilst is takes time for innovation to be embedded into products the stability this bottom up analysis indicates photonics underpins at least 13% of products and thus global economic activity. This consistent with top down analysis from SPIE and prior analysis for the European commission.
Analysis is ongoing of the geographic origin of those publication including photonics terms and how this has changed over the last three decades. Further analysis is also underway to identify the hottest and emerging topics both within photonics and in those wider research fields including photonics terms in their publications.
This work is dedicated by Dr John Lincoln to Dr Karen (Amos) Lincoln 4/10/1965-3/3/2025, taken from us before her time
[i] Priem, J., Piwowar, H., & Orr, R. (2022). OpenAlex: A fully-open index of scholarly works, authors, venues, institutions, and concepts. ArXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.01833
