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The following HTML text is provided to enhance online readability. Many aspects of typography translate only awkwardly to HTML. Please use the page image as the authoritative form to ensure accuracy. page, year" form so that we can match them to a scientific bibliography. Take a look at the front page of a U.S. patent—and this can be done easily; IBM has a wonderful Web site for U.S. patents (http://patent.womplex.ibm.com)—and look at the form of the scientific references. The nonpatent reference is a tribute to the creativity of the American inventor and the patent attorney. The first word can be anything. It can be a journal; it can be a name; it can be part of a title. It can be virtually anything, and it takes a lot of time and effort to turn these references into something that can actually be matched to a scientific paper. At the moment we are standardizing about 5,000 references a week. This allows us to link patents (technology) to publications (science). We need to consider a number of the characteristics of the linkage from patents to scientific publications. First, we are discussing the central references—the ones on the front page of the patent, placed there by both the applicant and the examiner, and passed by the examiner. What we find is that patents are citing papers at a rapidly increasing rate. It has increased by 200 percent in just 6 years for a patent system that has grown by just 25 to 30 percent over that same period. Everything else is changing slowly in the patent system, except the way in which it links to science. The linkage is very subject specific. Patents in biotechnology primarily cite publications in clinical medicine and biomedical research, especially in basic biomedical research; patents in chemistry cite chemistry and chemical engineering publications; patents in computing and communications tend to cite engineering and applied physics papers, especially those published in the journals of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. So the linkage is very subject specific, just as citing in a scientific paper is—a chemistry publication largely cites chemistry papers, with a few citing biology or physics papers (i.e., most citations are to a very narrow section of the literature). Citation patterns common in the scientific literature are similar to those in the patent literature. The linkage between patents and scientific publications is also national. U.S.-invented patents heavily cite U.S.-authored scientific papers. German-invented patents cite German scientific papers, Japanese patents cite Japanese papers, and so on. Patent citations are not homogeneous; they are quite national. Perhaps the most startling finding is that 73 percent of the science citations on the front pages of U.S. industry patents are to publicly funded science, that is, to scientific publications from universities, government laboratories, government-funded research and development centers, and other public laboratories. From this it is clear that publicly funded science is having a major impact on U.S. technology. Figure 6.2 shows that inventors in every country in the U.S. patent system are increasingly linking their patents to science and that the patents of U.K. and U.S. inventors are linked particularly strongly to science. Part of this is because the United States and the United Kingdom are heavily involved in biotechnology and drug and medicine patents, which are the most science-linked component of the patent system. But even when adjusting for the specific area of technology, a U.K. patent is more likely to cite scientific papers than is a Japanese patent in the same area. In the U.S. patent system, half of the patents are granted to U.S. inventors and half to foreign inventors. Thus, of the approximately 100,000 patents granted each year, 50,000 or so have U.S. inventors. Of the remaining 50,000 patents, 20,000 have Japanese inventors, and another 20,000 or so have Western European inventors. The other 10,000 are from Canada, Taiwan, Korea, and smaller countries. As an aside, we were examining some patent data the other day and found that both Korea and Taiwan are rapidly approaching the United Kingdom in number of patents granted in the United States—the number of patents issued in these two Asian countries was insignificant 10 years ago. The nationality of the inventor is determined based on the address of the inventor, not on the country in which the company is headquartered. An IBM patent invented in Switzerland, for example, is included in the Swiss patent count, not the U.S. patent count.
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