Significant difference of dependence upon scientific knowledge among different technologies

Summary The authors have constructed an original database of the full text of the Japanese Patent Gazette published since 1994. The database includes not only the front page but also the body text of more than 880,000 granted Japanese patents. By reading the full texts of all 1,500 patent samples, we found that some inventors cite many academic papers in addition to earlier patents in the body texts of their Japanese patents. Using manually extracted academic paper citations and patent citations as “right” answers, we fine-tuned a search algorithm that automatically retrieves cited scientific papers and patents from the entire texts of all the Japanese patents in the database. An academic paper citation in a patent text indicates that the inventor used scientific knowledge in the cited paper when he/she invented the idea codified in the citing patent. The degree of science linkage, as measured by the number of research papers cited in patent documents, is particularly strong in biotechnology. Among other types of technology, those related to photographic-sensitized material, cryptography, optical computing, and speech recognition also show strong science linkage. This suggests that the degree of dependence on scientific knowledge differs from technology to technology and therefore, different ways of university-industry collaboration are necessary for different technology fields.     

Linkage between patents and papers: An interim EPO/US comparison

A unification of more than one million non-patent references (NPR's) on the front pages of U.S. and EPO patents has been carried out, with a subsequent match to theScience Citation Index (SCI), in order to investigate the citation linkage between patented technology and the scientific research literature. The U.S. system shows an extremely rapid increase in linkage, with citations from U.S. patents to U.S. authored papers increasing more than three-fold over the last decade. The EPO system does not show any increase; the occurrence of non-patent references appears to be relatively constant in the EPO system over the last decade. In the U.S. system approximately 75 percent of the cited papers originate in public science institutions, showing large dependence of patented industrial technology on public science. We expect to find similar result in the EPO system.     

What is Special about Patent Citations? Differences between Scientific and Patent Citations

The emergence of pattent bibliometrics as a new branch of scientometrics necessitates a deeper understanding of the relationship between patents and papers. As this connection is established through the linkage between patents and research papers, one must have a clear idea of similarities and differences between patent and paper citations. This paper will investigate to what extent one can not only apply bibliometric methods to patents but also extend the existing interpretative framework for citations in research papers to the field of patent citations. After pointing out some parallels in the debates about the nature of citations in patents and scientific articles, the paper outlines those parts of bibliometric theory covering scientific citations that could be relevant to patent citations too. Then it highlights the specialties and peculiarities of patent citations. One major conclusion is that the general nature of a common framework for both scientific and patent citations would severely limit its usefulness, but research on academic citations might still be a great source of inspiration to the study of patent citations.     

Citation rates to technologically important patents

The purpose of this study was to determine whether the average number of citations received by issued U.S. patents from subsequently issued U.S. patents is higher for patents associated with important technological advances than for a group of randomly selected patents. Analysis of examiners' citations to 100 selected patents showed that these selected patents, which underlay technically important products, were more than twice as frequently cited (significance level of 0.0001) as a randomly selected set of 102 control patents. This finding provides strong evidence for the hypothesis that patent citation data can be used in technological indicators development, and in technological policy analysis, since it implies that the location and analysis of groups of highly cited patents can provide a valid indicator of patent areas of technical importance.     

Patents cited in the scientific literature: An exploratory study of 'reverse' citation relations

This paper reports on a new approach to study the linkage between science and technology. Unlike most contributions to this area we do not trace citations of scientific literature in patents but explore citations of patents in scientific literature. Our analysis is based on papers recorded in the 1996-2000 annual volumes of the CD-Edition of Science Citation Index (SCI) of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and patent data provided by the US Patent and Trademark Office. Almost 30,000 US patents were cited by scientific research papers. We analysed the citation links by scientific fields and technological sectors. Chemistry-related subfields tended to cite patents more than other scientific area. Among technological sectors, chemical clearly dominates followed by drugs and medical patents as the most frequently cited categories. Further analyses included a country-ranking based on inventor-addresses of the cited patents, a more detailed inspection of the ten most cited patents, and an analysis of class-field transfers. The paper concludes with the suggestions for future research. One of them is to compare our 'reverse' citation data with 'regular' patent citation data within the same classification system to see whether citations occur, irrespectively of their directionality, in the same fields of science and technology. Another question is as to how one should interpret reverse citation linkages.     

Bibliometric performance measures

Three different types of bibliometrics — literature bibliometrics, patent bibliometrics, and linkage bibliometric can all be used to address various government performance and results questions. Applications of these three bibliometric types will be described within the framework of Weinberg's internal and external criteria, whether the work being done is good science, efficiently and effectively done, and whether it is important science from a technological viewpoint. Within all bibliometrics the fundamental assumption is that the frequency with which a set of papers or patents is cited is a measure of the impact or influence of the set of papers. The literature bibliometric indicators are counts of publications and citations received in the scientific literature and various derived indicators including such phenomena as cross-sectoral citation, coauthorship and concentration within influential journals. One basic observation of literature bibliometrics, which carries over to patent bibliometrics, is that of highly skewed distributions — with a relatively small number of high-impact patents and papers, and large numbers of patents and papers of minimal impact. The key measure is whether an agency is producing or supporting highly cited papers and patents. The final set of data are in the area of linkage bibliometrics, looking at citations from patents to scientific papers. These are particularly relevant to the external criteria, in that it is quite obvious that institutions and supporting agencies whose papers are highly cited in patents are making measurable contributions to a nation's technological progress.     

Indirect patent citations

Patent citations are extensively used as a measure of patent quality. However, counting citations does not account for the fact that citations come from patents of different qualities, and that citations are of variable qualities. We develop a citation index which takes into account the cumulative quality of the citing patents. We apply this index to the 2,139,314 utility patents granted in the U.S. between 1975 and 1999. We study the properties of this index by year and by technological category, and analyse the links between patents.     

Prolific inventors—A bibliometric analysis

Patent information on 7392 inventors who received 9 or more U.S. Patents during 1975–84 was obtained. Analysis of the frequency distribution of patents per inventor reveals an approximately logarithmic decline from 9 to approximately 45 patents per inventor. The rate of decline decreases significantly for patent output above 45 patents per inventor. Patent citation analysis on 45 randomly selected inventors was performed. This sample included inventors who received from 9 to over 100 patents. The group received 1.79 citations per patent, 56.8% of the patents received at least 1 citation, and 2.7% of the patents received 10 or more citations. No statistically significant differences for these averages was found across the range of inventor patent output. No significant decline of patent quality with increased yearly patent output was observed.     

Technological Relevance of Science: An Assessment of Citation Linkages between Patents and Research Papers

Patent citations to the research literature offer a way for identifying and comparing contributions of scientific and technical knowledge to technological development. This case study applies this approach through a series of analyses of citations to Dutch research papers listed on Dutch-invented and foreign patents granted in the US during the years 1987–1996.First, we examined the general validity and utility of these data as input for quantitative analyses of science-technology interactions. The findings provide new empirical evidence in support of the general view that these citations reflect genuine links between science and technology. The results of the various analyses reveal several important features of industrially relevant Dutch science: (1) the international scientific impact of research papers that are also highly cited by patents, (2) the marked rise in citations to Dutch papers on foreign-invented patents; (3) the large share of author-inventor self-citations in Dutch-invented patents; (4) the growing relevance of the life sciences, (5) an increase in the importance of scientific co-operation. We also find significant differences between industrial sectors as well as major contributions of large science-based multinational enterprises, such as Philips, in domestic science-technology linkages.The paper concludes by discussing general benefits and limitations of this bibliometric approach for macro-level analysis of science bases in advanced industrialised countries like the Netherlands.     

Can applied science be ‘good science’? Exploring the relationship between patent citations and citation impact in nanoscience

There is a rich literature on how science and technology are related to each other. Patent citation analysis is amongst the most frequently used to tool to track the strengths of links. In this paper we explore the relationship between patent citations and citation impact in nanoscience. Our observations indicate that patent-cited papers perform better in terms of standard bibliometric indicators than comparable publications that are not linked to technology in this way. More specifically, we found that articles cited in patents are more likely to be cited also by other papers. The share of highly cited papers is the most striking result. Instead of the average of 4% of all papers, 13.8% of the papers cited once or twice in patents fall into this category and even 23.5% of the papers more frequently cited in patents receive citation rates far above the standard. Our analyses further demonstrate the presence and the relevance of bandwagon effects driving the development of science and technology.     

The growing number of patent citations to scientific papers: Changes in the world,nations, and fields

This study analyzes USPTO patents in the period 1998–2017. The number of science-related patents has increased twice as fast as the number of patents and scientific publications, and the number of cited papers per patent has almost doubled. These results vary substantially from one scientific and technological field to another. The proportion of the research papers cited by a patent has doubled. It refers to papers that are mostly published by the countries that have developed both scientific and technological capability and, surprisingly, are mainly used by inventors abroad. However, a weak relationship between the number of citations received from patents and papers reveals that the assessment of research performance needs some changes as the percentage of papers related to the innovations has grown over time.     

The citation impact of social sciences and humanities upon patentable technology

This paper examines the citation impact of papers published in scientific-scholarly journals upon patentable technology, as reflected in examiner- or inventor-given references in granted patents. It analyses data created by SCImago Research Group, linking PATSTAT’s scientific non-patent references (SNPRs) to source documents indexed in Scopus. The frequency of patent citations to journal papers is calculated per discipline, year, institutional sector, journal subject category, and for “top” journals. PATSTAT/Scopus-based statistics are compared to those derived from Web of Science/USPTO linkage. A detailed assessment is presented of the technological impact of research publications in social sciences and humanities (SSH). Several subject fields perform well in terms of the number of citations from patents, especially Library and Information Science, Language and Linguistics, Education, and Law, but many of the most cited journals find themselves in the interface between SSH and biomedical or natural sciences. Analyses of the titles of citing patents and cited papers are presented that shed light upon the cognitive content of patent citations. It is proposed to develop more advanced indicators of citation impact of papers upon patents, and ways to combine citation counts with citation content and context analysis.

     

Neophilia ranking of scientific journals

The ranking of scientific journals is important because of the signal it sends to scientists about what is considered most vital for scientific progress. Existing ranking systems focus on measuring the influence of a scientific paper (citations)—these rankings do not reward journals for publishing innovative work that builds on new ideas. We propose an alternative ranking based on the proclivity of journals to publish papers that build on new ideas, and we implement this ranking via a text-based analysis of all published biomedical papers dating back to 1946. In addition, we compare our neophilia ranking to citation-based (impact factor) rankings; this comparison shows that the two ranking approaches are distinct. Prior theoretical work suggests an active role for our neophilia index in science policy. Absent an explicit incentive to pursue novel science, scientists underinvest in innovative work because of a coordination problem: for work on a new idea to flourish, many scientists must decide to adopt it in their work. Rankings that are based purely on influence thus do not provide sufficient incentives for publishing innovative work. By contrast, adoption of the neophilia index as part of journal-ranking procedures by funding agencies and university administrators would provide an explicit incentive for journals to publish innovative work and thus help solve the coordination problem by increasing scientists’ incentives to pursue innovative work.     

Identifying rapidly evolving technological trends for R&;D planning using SAO-based semantic patent networks

Patents constitute an up-to-date source of competitive intelligence in technological development; thus, patent analysis has been a vital tool for identifying technological trends. Patent citation analysis is easy to use, but fundamentally has two main limitations: (1) new patents tend to be less cited than old ones and may miss citations to contemporary patents; (2) citation-based analysis cannot be used for patents in databases which do not require citations. Naturally, citation-based analysis tends to underestimate the importance of new patents and may not work in rapidly-evolving industries in which technology life-cycles are shortening and new inventions are increasingly patented world-wide. As a remedy, this paper proposes a patent network based on semantic patent analysis using subject-action-object (SAO) structures. SAO structures represent the explicit relationships among components used in a patent, and are considered to represent key concepts of the patent or the expertise of the inventor. Based on the internal similarities between patents, the patent network provides the up-to-date status of a given technology. Furthermore, this paper suggests new indices to identify the technological importance of patents, the characteristics of patent clusters, and the technological capabilities of competitors. The proposed method is illustrated using patents related to synthesis of carbon nanotubes. We expect that the proposed procedure and analysis will be incorporated into technology planning processes to assist experts such as researchers and R&D policy makers in rapidly-evolving industries.     

Factors affecting the diffusion of patented military technology in the field of weapons and ammunition

In this paper, we carry out an empirical analysis to address some questions concerning the flow of knowledge stemming from military patented technologies. Patented military technology consists of a set of inventions which nature, uses or/and applications have defensive or offensive purposes. In this paper, we focus on the field of weapons and ammunition. Our objective is to identify, why the knowledge embedded in a military technology diffuses into other patented technologies. The methodology relies on a patent citations analysis and involves the specification of several multilevel logit models to identify the individual and country characteristics that determine the citation of military patents in subsequent patents. The data contain 1,756 citations to 582 patents of military origin with a simultaneous Europe–US protection and registered by companies/institutions from 1998 to 2003. The results reveal that military knowledge diffuses more intensively across civil patents, when the original military patent includes diverse technologies (civil and military) and is progressively less specific in terms of weapons and ammunition. Military patents filed by British, French, US, Japanese and German companies are, in this order, more likely to have a larger number of citations in subsequent civil patents. The ownership of the original military patent is not a determining factor for explaining the diffusion into civil patents, but it does influence the diffusion across mixed and military technologies. Finally, the technological capacity of the citing company also affects the type and intensity of the diffusion of the military knowledge.     

Patent citation analysis in a novel field of technology:An exploration of nano-science and nano-technology

This paper explores the interrelationships between science and technology in the emergingarea of nano-science and technology. We track patent citation relations at the sectoraldisciplinary,the organizational, and the combined industrial/organizational levels. Then weinvestigate the geographic location and organizational affiliation of inventor/authors. Our mainfinding is that there are only a small number of citations connecting nano-patents with nanosciencepapers, while nano-science and technology appear to be relatively well connected incomparison with other fields. Further explorations suggest that nano-science and technology arestill mostly separated spheres, even though there are overlaps, as an analysis of title words shows.Another observation is that university-assigned patents seem to cite papers more frequently thanother patents.     

A bibliometric analysis of physics publications in Korea, 1994-1998

This study examined research performance of Korean physicists, comparing Korean-authoredpapers versus internationally co-authored papers, indexed in SCI, 1994-1998, and using thenumber of citations received by internationally co-authored papers covered by the SCI CD-ROM.For the study, 4,665 papers published from the researchers affiliated with the physics departmentsor physics-associated laboratories at Korean universities and indexed by SCI were analyzed.Korean authored papers tended to be published in Korean, Japanese, and UK journals, whileinternationally co-authored papers were more likely to appear in German, Dutch, and Swissjournals. Among the 18 authorship countries (on the basis of first author), 93 internationally co-authored papers by U.S. researchers had the highest citation rate, an average 15.9 citations perpaper. Of the eight countries that published over 5 papers, there was no correlation between theaverage number of citations per paper and the total number of citations. However, an ANOVAindicated a significant difference between the average number of citations per paper according tocountry (F = 5.84, p < 0.0005). In other words, papers by the U.S. and French researchers tendedto be cited more frequently than papers by the Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Germanresearchers.     

Influences of counting methods on country rankings: a perspective from patent analysis

The counting of patents and citations is commonly used to evaluate technological innovation and its impact. However, in an age of increasing international collaboration, the counting of international collaboration patents has become a methodological issue. This study compared country rankings using four different counting methods (i.e. whole counting, straight counting, whole-normalized counting, complete-normalized counting) in patent, citation and citation-patent ratio (CP ratio) counts. It also observed inflation depending on the method used. The counting was based on the complete 1992–2011 patent and citation data issued by United States Patent and Trademark Office. The results show that counting methods have only minor effects on country rankings in patent count, citation count and CP ratio count. All four counting methods yield reliable country ranks in technology innovation capability and impact. While the influences of counting methods vary between patent count, citation count and CP ratio count, counting methods may exert slightly greater effects on CP ratio counts than on patent and citation counts. As for the inflation, the distributions of higher and lower inflation by the four counting methods are different in patent, citation and CP ratio counts.     

The technology assessment and forecast program of the United States patent and trademark office

Often overlooked is the wealth of information in patents that makes patents useful to public policy making agencies and corporate management, among others. The source of this information is the bibliographic and classification data associated with each patent. much of which is required by law and hence is extremely accurate. These data serve to fingerprint the increment of technological activity disclosed in a patent. Possible ways of using the data include: — identification of emerging technologies — Monotoring foreign activity — identification of “actors” in the technology — tracking applications and impacts of a technologyThe objective of the technology assessment and forecast program of the United States Patent and Trademark Office is to stimulate the use of the patent file of the Office. The Office of Technology Assessment and Forecast (OTAF), which administers the program has assembled a master data base covering all U.S. patents. It periodically updates this base and adds new data items to it.