Data-mining the Foundational Patents of Photovoltaic Materials: An application of Patent Citation Spectroscopy

TL;DR

This study applies Patent Citation Spectroscopy to identify foundational patents in photovoltaic materials, extending the method with advanced search options and validating its effectiveness across multiple patent subclasses.

Contribution

It adapts and extends Patent Citation Spectroscopy for patent analysis in photovoltaic technologies, providing a tool to identify foundational patents with validation across subclasses.

Findings

Successfully identified corroborating foundational patents in five of nine subclasses.

Extended PCS with advanced search queries at PatentsView.

Demonstrated effectiveness of PCS in patent literature analysis.

Abstract

We apply Patent Citation Spectroscopy (PCS)--originally developed as Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy for studying landmarks and milestones in scientific literature--to patent literature classified into the nine Y-subclasses of the Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) that describe material photovoltaic technologies. For this study we extended the routine with the option to use the advanced search queries at PatentsView. On the basis of two normalizations of the longitudinal distribution of the publication years of the patents cited by the retrieved patents, the routine (at http://www.leydesdorff.net/comins/pcs/index.html) provides a best guess of the foundational patent for the subject specified in the string. In five of the nine cases, we found corroborating evidence for the foundational character of the patent indicated by the routine.