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Visualizing the structure and bridges of the intellectual property management and strategy literature: a document co-citation analysis

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Abstract

This article uses document co-citation analysis to objectively explore the underlying structure of the intellectual property research domain, taken from a managerial and strategic standpoint. The goal of this study is identifying its main research areas, understanding its current state of development and suggesting potential future directions, by analyzing the co-citations from 181 papers published between 1992 and 2011 in the most influential academic journals. Five main clusters have been identified, mapped, and labeled as follows: Economics of patent system, technological and institutional capabilities, university patenting, intellectual property exploitation, and division of labor. Their most active areas on this topic, and the most influential and co-cited papers have been identified and described. Also, intra- and inter-cluster knowledge base diversity has been assessed by using indicators stemming from the domains of information theory and biology. A t test has been performed to assess the significance of the inter-cluster diversity. The knowledge bases of these five clusters are significantly diverse, this meaning that they are five co-existing paradigms.

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Notes

  1. Mature collectives break into a small esoteric circle—a group of specialists which “are in the know”—and a wide exoteric circle for all those members, who are under the influence of the style, but do not play an active role in its formation. Members of the first group are those “initiated”—priests and theologians in the case of religion; artists and art critics in the case of art; scientists in the case of science etc. The corresponding exoteric circles for those groups are: lay believers; art-lovers; school teachers of physics, chemistry, and biology, and also engineers and all people interested in science (source: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fleck/).

  2. This law proposes that a few journals, publications, scientists, etc. contain the majority of articles, citations, etc. (Garfield 1980).

  3. This list omits influential books, monographs, and book chapters, since these types of publications are not readily extracted from the ISI Web of Science database.

  4. This threshold was necessary to make the map more readable.

  5. Editorial letters, book reviews, proceedings, intro to symposiums, meeting abstracts, books, were deleted from our final network. Only scientific papers appear.

  6. For a comprehensive mathematical justification of the index derivation and characterization, make reference to Pielou (1969), Hutcheson (1970), Bowman et al. (1971); and Maurer and McGill 2011) for more recent contributions.

  7. Complete tables are available on request.

  8. A detailed description of the jack-knifing procedure for the Shannon-Wiener Diversity Index is provided in Magurran (1988), pp. 42–43.

  9. A note of caution: the Shannon-Wiener diversity index is a non-parametric index. Hence, no assumptions are made about the shape of the underlying species abundance distribution (Southwood and Henderson 2000; Magurran 1988, 2004). A substantial error can arise when the sample does not include all the species in the community (Peet 1974); however, as the true species richness of an assemblage is usually unknown, an unbiased estimator of the Shannon-Wiener index does not exist (Lande 1996). Hutcheson (1970), by assuming that each population is normally (or nearly normal) distributed and that the values of real variances are not known, advanced a test with a statistic following an approximately t-distribution with specific degrees of freedom. Deviations from these assumptions may invalidate t test results and assessments concerning significant differences of cluster diversities may rely on absolute (jack-knifed) values of the Shannon-Wiener index only.

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Acknowledgments

We want to thank Prof. Antonella Martini (University of Pisa), Prof. Daniela Baglieri (University of Messina), and the three reviewers for their invaluable suggestions and support. Fabrizio Cesaroni also acknowledges support from the Spanish Ministry of Economics and Competitiveness, project ECO2011-27942.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Energy Systems, Territory, and Construction Engineering (DESTEC), University of Pisa, Largo L. Lazzarino, 56122, Pisa, Italy

    Francesco Paolo Appio

  2. Department of Business Administration, University Carlos III de Madrid, Calle Madrid, 126, 28903, Getafe, Madrid, Spain

    Fabrizio Cesaroni

  3. Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Istituto di Management, Piazza Martiri della Libertà, 33, 56127, Pisa, Italy

    Fabrizio Cesaroni & Alberto Di Minin

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  1. Francesco Paolo Appio
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Appendices

Appendix 1

See Appendix Table 6.

Table 6 Set of journals, articles per journal, and total citations to delineate the field of intellectual property (managerial and strategic approaches)
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Appendix 2

See Appendix Table 7.

Table 7 Citations and Self-citations per article
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Appendix 3

See Appendix Table 8.

Table 8 Publications containing authors pairs co-cited more than 6 times
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Appendix 4

See Appendix Table 9.

Table 9 In red, the list of articles defining cluster 1 (Economics of Patent System)
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Appendix 5

See Appendix Table 10.

Table 10 In green, the list of articles defining cluster 2 (technological and institutional capabilities)
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Appendix 6

See Appendix Table 11.

Table 11 In blue, the list of articles defining cluster 3 (University Patenting)
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Appendix 7

See Appendix Table 12.

Table 12 In yellow, the list of articles defining cluster 4 (IP Exploitation)
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Appendix 8

See Appendix Table 13.

Table 13 In purple, the list of articles defining cluster 5 (division of labor)
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Appio, F.P., Cesaroni, F. & Di Minin, A. Visualizing the structure and bridges of the intellectual property management and strategy literature: a document co-citation analysis. Scientometrics 101, 623–661 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-014-1329-0

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