Wolfram Library Archive


Courseware Demos MathSource Technical Notes
All Collections Articles Books Conference Proceedings
Title Downloads

Patent Citation Networks
Author

Bernard Gress
Organization: Fannie Mae
Conference

2006 Wolfram Technology Conference
Conference location

Champaign IL
Description

Patent citations are part of the legal patent process where the patent applicant has the duty to disclose any knowledge of “prior art” among previous patents. Some objectivity in the process is provided by the government patent examiner who is supposed to be an expert in the area and who approves the final citation. The network established by patent citations allows one to trace the flow of technology through time, from patent to patent, and across fields. Studies of technological spillover effects, the impact or influence of individual patents, the rates of technological development, and other such issues can be assisted by the consideration of patent citations. This article creates functions for extracting and plotting patent citation networks from two publicly available databases, as well as functions for the analysis of these networks’ curvature.
Subject

*Mathematics > Discrete Mathematics > Graph Theory
Keywords

patent, network, graph
Downloads

Download
Patent Citation Networks.zip (2.5 MB) - ZIP archive [for Mathematica 5.1]