Abstract
Scientific and other non-patent references (NPRs) in patents are important tools to analyze interactions between science and technology. This paper organizes a database with 514,894 USPTO patents granted globally in 1974, 1982, 1990, 1998 and 2006. There are 165,762 patents with at least one reference to science and engineering (S&E) literature, from a total of 1,375,503 references. Through a lexical analysis, 71.1% of this S&E literature is classified by S&E fields. These data serve as the basis for the elaboration of global and national 3-dimensional matrices (technological domains, S&E fields and number of references). Three indicators are proposed to analyze these matrices, allowing us to identify patterns of structured growth that differentiate developed and non-developed countries. This differentiation informs suggestions for public policies for development, emphasizing the need for an articulation between the industrial and technological dimension and scientific side. The intertwinement of these two dimensions is a key component of developmental policies for the twenty-first century.
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Notes
If we go further in the investigation of the papers cited in these two patents, we can reach, in the first, example Isaac I. Rabi’s 1938 paper that described magnetic resonance as a new scientific phenomenon and, in the second example, the Watson and Crick work on DNA structure. But this is a subject for another investigation.
As an example of this referencing scheme, for the ISI-discipline Biotechnology (number 16), the key words were Biotechnology, Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, Biomedical, Genetic, Heredity, Biophy, Bioch.
In 1974 Information Technology ranked in 23rd position, Telecommunications in 13th, Semiconductors in 25th, and Audiovisual in 21st. In 2006 these technological domains jumped to 1st, 2nd, 5th and 8th positions, respectively.
Between 1974 and 2006, biotechnology moved upward from the last position (30th) to the 23rd, pharmaceuticals from the 29th to 20th and medical engineering from the 22nd to the 17th.
“Research medicine” was ranked 18th in 1974 and jumped to the 6th position in 2006, “immunology” jumped from 22nd to 11th and “biotechnology” from 17th to 9th, and “general biology” from 14th to 10th.
A comparison with other research tools: comparison between the Matrix for the USA in 2006 and a Matrix built upon Cohen et al. (2002, p. 11): the Matrix from Cohen et al. would have an MFI equal to 94.9%. A comparison between the Matrix for Brazil 2006 and a Matrix built upon Rapini (2007): if Rapini had produced a Matrix, its MFI would be 17.7%. These observations show how these matrices of science and technology interactions are coherent with other research tools and get impressive similar results. This coherence strengthens the usefulness of this research tool, especially because these matrices allow an inter-country comparability that no other research tool has obtained, at least to date.
Of course, according to editorial norms regarding manuscript size, it is not possible to show all these matrices here. However, these matrices are available to the interested reader on request.
In this case, the correlation between the matrices from China and the United States for 2006 is relevant: in 2006 this correlation was high: 0.75.
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Acknowledgements
CNPq, Fapemig (Brazil), and the IDRC (Canada) partially supported this work. We would like to thank the anonymous referees and Scientometrics’ Editor in Chief, Tibor Braun, for their criticisms and suggestions. Any remaining errors are ours.
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Ribeiro, L.C., Ruiz, R.M., Bernardes, A.T. et al. Matrices of science and technology interactions and patterns of structured growth: implications for development. Scientometrics 83, 55–75 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-009-0020-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-009-0020-3