The Nexus of Open Science and Innovation: Insights from Patent Citations

Author : Abdelghani Maddi

This paper aims to analyze the extent to which inventive activity relies on open science. In other words, it investigates whether inventors utilize Open Access (OA) publications more than subscription-based ones, especially given that some inventors may lack institutional access.

To achieve this, we utilized the (Marx, 2023) database, which contains citations of patents to scientific publications (Non-Patent References-NPRs). We focused on publications closely related to invention, specifically those cited solely by inventors within the body of patent texts. Our dataset was supplemented by OpenAlex data.

The final sample comprised 961,104 publications cited in patents, of which 861,720 had a DOI. Results indicate that across all disciplines, OA publications are 38% more prevalent in patent citations (NPRs) than in the overall OpenAlex database.

In biology and medicine, inventors use 73% and 27% more OA publications, respectively, compared to closed-access ones. Chemistry and computer science are also disciplines where OA publications are more frequently utilized in patent contexts than subscription-based ones.

HAL : https://cnrs.hal.science/hal-04454843

Dataset Artefacts are the Hidden Drivers of the Declining Disruptiveness in Science

Authors : Vincent Holst, Andres Algaba, Floriano Tori, Sylvia Wenmackers, Vincent Ginis

Park et al. [1] reported a decline in the disruptiveness of scientific and technological knowledge over time. Their main finding is based on the computation of CD indices, a measure of disruption in citation networks [2], across almost 45 million papers and 3.9 million patents.

Due to a factual plotting mistake, database entries with zero references were omitted in the CD index distributions, hiding a large number of outliers with a maximum CD index of one, while keeping them in the analysis [1]. Our reanalysis shows that the reported decline in disruptiveness can be attributed to a relative decline of these database entries with zero references. Notably, this was not caught by the robustness checks included in the manuscript.

The regression adjustment fails to control for the hidden outliers as they correspond to a discontinuity in the CD index. Proper evaluation of the Monte-Carlo simulations reveals that, because of the preservation of the hidden outliers, even random citation behaviour replicates the observed decline in disruptiveness.

Finally, while these papers and patents with supposedly zero references are the hidden drivers of the reported decline, their source documents predominantly do make references, exposing them as pure dataset artefacts.

URL : Dataset Artefacts are the Hidden Drivers of the Declining Disruptiveness in Science

DOI : https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.10656940

« Les brevets sont à peine au rang d’une publication » : Projets de valorisation et cycle de crédibilité au CNRS

Autrice/Author : Victoria Brun

Cet article vise à expliciter la place qu’occupent les activités de valorisation dans les carrières des personnels de la recherche publique et la manière dont ils travaillent ou non à les internaliser dans le cycle de crédibilité académique (Latour & Woolgar, 1979).

À partir d’une enquête conduite dans des projets de valorisation liés au CNRS, l’analyse montre que les activités de valorisation sont pensées conjointement avec les activités académiques. Si les chercheur·se·s échouent le plus souvent à les convertir en reconnaissance sans détour par la publication, il·elle·s peuvent réinjecter cet investissement sous forme de financement et d’équipement pour d’autres travaux.

D’autres décident de les externaliser, faisant de la valorisation un à-côté de la carrière. Les doctorant·e·s et les ingénieur·e·s, qui participent pourtant à alimenter le cycle de crédibilité des chercheur·se·s, investissent des voies professionnelles parallèles. Enfin, l’engagement dans des projets de valorisation expose à des risques de décrédibilisation que les chercheur·se·s dénouent en défendant une conception du désintéressement scientifique compatible avec la perspective applicative.

La transformation de l’économie de la crédibilité se fait donc à la marge, malgré les multiples dispositifs incitatifs des institutions de recherche.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/rac.30214

Are patents linked on Twitter? A case study of Google patents

Authors : Enrique Orduña‑Malea, Cristina I. Font‑Julián

This study attempts to analyze patents as cited/mentioned documents to better understand the interest, dissemination and engagement of these documents in social environments, laying the foundations for social media studies of patents (social Patentometrics).

Particularly, this study aims to determine how patents are disseminated on Twitter by analyzing three elements: tweets linking to patents, users linking to patents, and patents linked from Twitter.

To do this, all the tweets containing at least one link to a full-text patent available on Google Patents were collected and analyzed, yielding a total of 126,815 tweets (and 129,001 links) to 86,417 patents. The results evidence an increase of the number of linking tweets over the years, presumably due to the creation of a standardized patent URL ID and the integration of Google Patents and Google Scholar, which took place in 2015.

The engagement achieved by these tweets is limited (80.2% of tweets did not attract likes) but increasing notably since 2018. Two super-publisher twitter bot accounts (dailypatent and uspatentbot) are responsible of 53.3% of all the linking tweets, while most accounts are sporadic users linking to patent as part of a conversation.

The patents most tweeted are, by far, from United States (87.5% of all links to Google Patents), mainly due to the effect of the two super-publishers. The impact of patents in terms of the number of tweets linking to them is unrelated to their year of publication, status or number of patent citations received, while controversial and media topics might be more determinant factors.

However, further research is needed to better understand the topics discussed around patents on Twitter, the users involved, and the metrics attained. Given the increasing number of linking users and linked patents, this study finds Twitter as a relevant source to measure patent-level metrics, shedding light on the impact and interest of patents by the broad public.

URL : Are patents linked on Twitter? A case study of Google patents

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04519-y

The citation from patents to scientific output revisited: a new approach to the matching Patstat / Scopus

Authors : Vicente P. Gerrero-Bote, Rodrigo Sánchez-Jiménez, Félix De-Moya-Anegón

Patents include citations, both to other patents and to documents that are not patents (NPL, Non-patent literature). Among the latter include citations to articles published in scientific journals.

Just as the scientific impact is studied through the citation of articles and other scientific works, the technological impact of scientific works can also be studied through the citation they receive from patents.

The NPL references included in the patents are far from being standardized, so determining which scientific article they refer to is not trivial. This paper presents a procedure for linking the NPL references of the patents collected in the Patstat database and the scientific works indexed in the Scopus bibliographic database.

This procedure consists of two phases: a broad generation of candidate couples and another phase of validation of couples. It has been implemented with reasonable good results and affordable costs.

URL : https://recyt.fecyt.es/index.php/EPI/article/view/epi.2019.jul.01

Comparing scientific and technological impact of biomedical research

Author : Qing Ke

Traditionally, the number of citations that a scholarly paper receives from other papers is used as the proxy of its scientific impact. Yet citations can come from domains outside the scientific community, and one such example is through patented technologies—paper can be cited by patents, achieving technological impact.

While the scientific impact of papers has been extensively studied, the technological aspect remains largely unknown. Here we aim to fill this gap by presenting a comparative study on how 919 thousand biomedical papers are cited by U.S. patents and by other papers over time.

We observe a positive correlation between citations from patents and from papers, but there is little overlap between the two domains in either the most cited papers, or papers with the most delayed recognition.

We also find that the two types of citations exhibit distinct temporal variations, with patent citations lagging behind paper citations for a median of 6 years for the majority of papers. Our work contributes to the understanding of the technological, and societal in general, impact of papers.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.04105

Ouverture et partage des résultats de la recherche dans l’économie de la connaissance européenne : Quelle(s) liberté(s) de circulation pour l’IST?

Auteur/Author : Hans Dillaerts

Au cours de ces dix dernières années, il y a un engagement croissant de l’Union européenne en faveur de l’innovation ouverte, le libre accès et la science ouverte. Notre objectif au sein de cet article est de s’interroger sur les origines de ces politiques et d’en retracer les évolutions et les limites.

L’objectif de cette analyse est également de mettre en avant les injonctions contradictoires que subissent aujourd’hui les chercheurs en matière de publication et de diffusion de l’information scientifique et technique à travers entre autres les problématiques et questionnements liés à la brevetabilité des résultats de recherche financés sur des fonds publics.

URL : https://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_01716543