Análisis de los indicadores de medición de las citaciones científicas en patentes

Abstract

Patents are a valuable source of technical and legal information, but also from a bibliographic perspective, since they contain references to scientific and technological literature that are provided, both by the applicant and the patent examiner, during the grant procedure to justify the novelty and usefulness of the invention. The scientific literature that is cited in patents has been a key indicator in the study of the synergy between Science and Technology. Since the 1980s, pioneering authors such as Carpenter and Narín have studied the presence of these references in patents as an instrument for assessing the scientific influence on technology. Until recently, the focus of these measurements was mainly oriented towards assessing the impact that these citations had on patents. In recent years, however, there has been a growing interest in what it means for the scientific literature to be cited in these documents, which may give it a "technological" value within the academic field. Thus, in the same way that the impact of a scientific publication is determined by its citations in scientific journals, it will be possible to know its technological impact by its citations in patents. This will be possible with the application of specific metrics that allow the weighting and analysis of these citations, so that impact indices can be established to measure the level of technological transfer of scientific production, and which can be considered in scientific evaluation systems and agencies. The objective of this research is to analyse the current indicators of valuation of scientific literature cited in patents, with the aim of identifying, classifying and comparing them in order to consider their applicability as occurs with the traditional impact indices of scientific production. For this purpose, a series of practical studies are carried out in which the characteristics and functionalities of these citations in specialised patent search engines are analysed, with the aim of finding out what the treatment and bibliographic management of these references is, and to determine their availability and format for the application of metric indicators. In addition, the proposals for indicators developed in previous studies are reviewed in order to point out the most appropriate for weighting these references. The conclusions reached show that the measurement of these scientific references in patents is still in an emerging phase. Although some proposals for indicators already exist, it will be necessary to further define and verify their effectiveness from this new perspective. The research carried out in this doctoral thesis aims to respond to this need to establish metrics for evaluating these citations within the academic field. This involves a series of challenges that include a more thorough bibliographic control of these references from the patent offices, and that these entities are committed to the digital transformation of their data collections, with the adoption of standardised metadata structures that allow the exchange and linking of these references in different specialised bibliographic information sources. In addition, it would be essential that commercial bibliographic platforms, such as Web of Science or Scopus, track and count these citations for inclusion in their indexes. In this sense, it will be necessary to reformulate the traditional bibliometric indicators, or to propose new ones, which adapt to the peculiarities of these citations in patents and which allow the establishment of new rankings and/or the definition of "technological" profiles of journals, authors and institutions, so that they can be considered within scientific evaluation systems and agencies.