New Indicators of the Technological Impact of Scientific Production

Abstract Purpose Building upon pioneering work by Francis Narin and others, a new methodological approach to assessing the technological impact of scientific research is presented. Design/methodology/approach It is based on the analysis of citations made in patent families included in the PATSTAT database that is to scientific papers indexed in Scopus. Findings An advanced citation matching procedure is applied to the data in order to construct two indicators of technological impact: on the citing (patent) side, the country/region in which protection is sought and a patent family's propensity to cite scientific papers are taken into account, and on the cited (paper) side, a relative citation rate is defined for patent citations to papers that is similar to the scientific paper-to-paper citation rate in classical bibliometrics. Research limitations The results are limited by the available data, in our case Scopus and PATSTAT, and especially by the lack of standardization of references in patents. This required a matching procedure that is neither trivial nor exact. Practical implications Results at the country/region, document type, and publication age levels are presented. The country/region-level results in particular reveal features that have remained hidden in analyses of straight counts. Especially notable is that the rankings of some Asian countries/regions move upwards when the proposed normalized indicator of technological impact is applied as against the case with straight counts of patent citations to those countries/regions’ published papers. Originality/value In our opinion, the level of sophistication of the indicators proposed in the current paper is unparalleled in the scientific literature, and provides a solid basis for the assessment of the technological impact of scientific research in countries/regions and institutions.