Just like scientific articles, patents cite scientific literature to substantiate their findings. These citations provide valuable information about the ways in which science is used to create practical appliances. The extraction of the information, however, is not very easy. Jian Wang and Suzan Verberne from the Leiden Institute of Advanced Science (LIACS) have received nearly €100,000 from the EPO Academic Research Programme to examine how scientific knowledge is used in the development of patents.
Patent references
'There are two kinds of references in patents,' explains Wang. 'References on the front page, which are used to prove the patentability of the patents to the examiners, and in-text references, which can be compared to the scientific references. Due to their function, the latter is important to see how science is used in practice, but as they are part of the running text, they are also more difficult to recognize for a computer.'
Recognizing in-text references
On top of the recognition problem, the in-text references use different formats, often lack information such as a title and may contain errors. Wang and Verberne plan on using advanced text-mining methods to solve these problems. 'Using sequence labelling, the computer labels every word as being either part of a reference or not,' Verberne clarifies. 'Then, the computer is able to recognize what information the references hold and match this with the information of large databases with scientific publications. Eventually, we want to cover over 19 million patents.'
Application of science in technology
With the data they gain, they want to examine how science exactly contributes to the development of a patent. 'This research will give extensive insight in the characteristics of scientific publications that are used in technology,' they say. 'It might for example show that theoretical research is used in a different way than applied research, or that it leads to a different type of invention. And this is just one amongst many factors. We also want to see how patents citing different types of articles differ from each other. In the end, we will know a lot more about the ways in which science and technology work together and influence each other.'
The European Patent Office (EPO) has set up the Academic Research Programme in 2017 to stimulate researches to examine the role of patents in the European economy. Its aim is to gain knowledge which can be used by policymakers and business in Europe. The Academic Research Programme consists of a total amount of €300,000 per year.
