Citations from Patents

Patent citation analysis is used as an evaluation technique in science and technology with the premise that scholarly documents cited by later patents contain important ideas upon the subsequent inventions. The references to scholarly publications may have been added by the patent examiner at the time of prosecution and may provide background about the topic, methodology, or new potential areas for development.

The Citations from Patents indicator in InCites Benchmarking and Analytics displays the number of citations a set of publications has received from patents indexed in Derwent Innovations Index™ on Web of Science. This integration provides unique opportunities to not only assess the impact of patents on publications, but also allows user to further explore trends and patterns in innovations to deliver further insight into emerging fields of research.

The "Citations from Patents" indicator value is now hyperlinked in results sets. This is applicable for all the analysis explorers in InCites (i.e., Researchers, Organizations, Locations, Research Areas, Publication Sources, and Funding Agencies).

After selecting the hyperlink, a pop-up modal will display the high-level patent data within InCites including Patent Titles, Inventors, Patent Assignees, Derwent IDs, and Subject Areas.

For institutions that subscribe to Derwent Innovations Index via Web of Science, users can choose to view the entire list of citations from patents within Web of Science and will have full access to the powerful discovery, filtering and deeper analysis tools available within Web of Science. Up to fifty thousand patent documents can be exported in seconds from InCites for display and further evaluation in Web of Science making it possible to evaluate very large results sets.

Users in InCites can also choose to drill down into an individual patent details to view further information about that patent such as abstracts, images, other patents and publications cited by the inventors, and more…

While all InCites users will be able to see the patent summary information in InCites, viewing full patent details is only available for subscribers of the Derwent Innovations Index for Web of Science. Users whose institutions do not subscribe to Derwent Innovations Index will receive a message when trying to link to patent details instructing them to contact their administrator for more information about subscribing to the Derwent content.

Note that when running an analysis, it is expected to find differences in citations from patent counts when entities are compared. These differences might exist given the research field (basic research or applied research and topics), the size of the organization or the maturity of the journal among others, so these factors should be considered for a proper analysis.