Sustainability and Impact Study of Patent Literature for Scholarly Communication

A patent is an important source of scholarly information and forms a link for scholarly communication in any discipline. The role played by and the influence of patents on scientific invention and innovation has become integral part of R&D, Product development, marketing and many scientific and commercial activities. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the citations for the popular journal called Scientometrics available in the patents issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). This study provides an overview on the importance of patent citations to scientific journals and provides the citations from the patents available in the USPTO database for Scientometrics Journal, a journal in the field of Library and Information Science (LIS) and Scholarly metrics. This study identifies to what extent the articles from the Scientometrics journal are used and cited by inventors of the patents in the USPTO. We analyzed the patent citations to Scientometrics. The results show that the total number of core patent citations to Scientometrics journal papers on the USPTO were 53 out of 64 retrieved results. The technical papers (or technology-oriented papers) related to various scientific, technical, the World Wide Web, and search engines published in Scientometrics journal attracted more citations from patents.