The citation impact of social sciences and humanities upon patentable technology

TL;DR

This study investigates how social sciences and humanities research papers influence patentable technology by analyzing citation data from patents and scholarly sources, revealing interdisciplinary impacts and suggesting improved impact metrics.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the technological impact of SSH research on patents and proposes advanced indicators for citation impact assessment.

Findings

Certain SSH fields like Library & Information Science and Law have high patent citation counts.

Many influential SSH journals are at the intersection with biomedical and natural sciences.

Analysis of patent titles and cited papers offers insights into the cognitive content of citations.

Abstract

This paper examines the citation impact of papers published in scientific-scholarly journals upon patentable technology, as reflected in examiner- or inventor-given references in granted patents. It analyses data created by SCImago Research Group, linking PATSTAT's scientific non-patent references (SNPRs) to source documents indexed in Scopus. The frequency of patent citations to journal papers is calculated per discipline, year, institutional sector, journal subject category, and for "top" journals. PATSTAT/Scopus-based statistics are compared to those derived from Web of Science/USPTO linkage. A detailed assessment is presented of the technological impact of research publications in social sciences and humanities (SSH). Several subject fields perform well in terms of the number of citations from patents, especially Library & Information Science, Language & Linguistics, Education, and Law, but many of the most cited journals find themselves in the interface between SSH and biomedical or natural sciences. Analyses of the titles of citing patents and cited papers are presented that shed light upon the cognitive content of patent citations. It is proposed to develop more advanced indicators of citation impact of papers upon patents, and ways to combine citation counts with citation content and context analysis.