Scientific literature citations of patents: a preliminary investigation of "reverse" citation relationships

• WOLFGANG GLÄNZELHJI

  English

  Author

• MARTIN MEYERRT

  English

  Author

The article presents a novel strategy for investigating the connection between science and technology. Our work differs from
previous contributions in that we focus on the reverse—examining how patents cite scientific literature—rather than the reverse
(tracing citations of scientific literature in patents). Papers included in the CD-Edition of Science Citation Index (SCI) of the
Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) from 1996 to 2000 and patent data given by the US Patent and Trademark Office formed
the basis of our study. Almost thirty thousand US patents were referenced in scholarly articles. Separately for each scientific and
technical domain, we examined the citation linkages. Patents were cited more often in chemistry-related subfields compared to other
scientific areas. 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.

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