Mapping of Scientific Patenting

Extended Abstract – Science Mapping session at “1st Global TechMining Conference” 2011

Author: Mari Jibu, Department of Databases for Information and Knowledge Infrastructure, Innovation Headquarters, Japan Science and Technology Agency

“Mapping of Science” is available for getting a quick overview of the structure of science. With this context, it is hoped that policy making that should be based on scientific evidence. Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), as a funding agency in Japan, has developed the system (J-GLOBAL foresight) to analyze the linkage between scientific papers and patents. We succeeded in liking the database of scientific papers with those of patents and making “Mapping of Scientific Patenting” using “cytoscape” which is an open source platform for Complex-Network Analysis and visualization. “Mapping of Scientific Patenting” will be available for getting a quick overview of the structure of science and technology.

Analytical Method
Database
The scientific papers and patents loaded on J-GLOBAL foresight are as follows.
Scientific papers: Thomson Reuters “Essential Science Indicators (1999-2009)”
Patents: Thomson Reuters “Derwent Innovation Index”.
Co-citation Analysis
In this study, we extracted papers cited by patent examiners from the top 1 percent of the most frequently cited papers between 2005 and 2009, making the set M. We extracted more than two papers from M, and calculated the similarity, using the following cosine function (Salton’s normalization of co-citation) to calculate the similarity. We conducted cluster analysis to the set of papers whose values of the formula (1.1) were greater than 0.1.

Visualization Tool
In order to visualize the analysis for mapping, we used Cytoscape (Cytoscape can be downloaded at http://cytoscapte.org/index.php) as the platform since it is capable of visualizing and analyzing all sorts of complicated networks. This is an open source project (LGPL), where various network files can be read and free extensions by plug-in are available, thus made into a platform which can be visualized.

Mapping of Scientific Patenting
Figure 1 displays clusterized papers which co-cited by patent examiners from Derwent Innovation Index. We called those clusterized papers, “Innovation Front”. Each node represents an article by patent examiners whose bibliographic information is displayed in the Data Panel below when the user clicks on the node. The size of the node represents the frequency of citation.
Figure 1 Mapping of Scientific Patenting

Conclusion
With the use of scientific mapping, it is available for us to come closer to the realization of strategic policy making, based on scientific evidence, if we can find the appropriate field and researcher to fund, by taking a quick overview of the global trend. Also, since scientific Mapping can monitor the scientific papers cited by patent examiners, who act as close contacts between science and technology, it will be possible to find new fields which will bring impact to technology in the future.

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