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Patent research in the field of library and information science: Less useful or difficult to explore?

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Abstract

Patents and relevant topics are gaining momentum in economic analysis and scientific research with the rapid global intellectual property filings growth. However, a corresponding increase seems to be unspectacular in patent research publications, especially under the category of information science and library science. This paper provided a retrospect to the existing studies on patents collected from web of science and emphatically characterized the current situation through performing a series of bibliometric analysis. Prominent authors and institutions from mainland China, Taiwan and Belgium have carried out various studies on patent separately or jointly. Topics involved in 884 journal papers are reclassified from perspectives of the development, application and analysis of patents based on the results of keyword co-occurrence and typical publications in each stage. The final, but the novel part of this study was a sentence-by-sentence analysis of conclusive and citing ideas of recent publications, for tracing problems and potential researchable topics and indicating that patent research still has more spaces to move up.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their important comments. This work is supported jointly by the scholarship from China Scholarship Council (CSC) under the Grant CSC No. 201506060153 and the National Social Science Fund (No. 71473028).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Social Sciences, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Universitätsstr. 3b, 10117, Berlin, Germany

    Zhao Qu

  2. Department 2, German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies (DZHW), Schützenstr. 6a, 10117, Berlin, Germany

    Zhao Qu

  3. Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, 116 024, China

    Shanshan Zhang & Chunbo Zhang

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Qu, Z., Zhang, S. & Zhang, C. Patent research in the field of library and information science: Less useful or difficult to explore?. Scientometrics 111, 205–217 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2269-2

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