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Will patent family be dormant? Research on the identification and characteristics of sleeping beauty’s patent family

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Abstract

Studying the Sleeping Beauty phenomenon of scientific accomplishments can promote advanced and transformative technologies identification. Although there are significant researches focused on scientific Sleeping Beauty, they have limited concern toward the measurement or characteristic description of Sleeping Beauty patent (SBP) or patent family. This study aims to combine them and identify the Sleeping Beauty patent family (SBPF). Accordingly, we constructed a patent family knowledge diffusion burst detection model by patent family’s citation and assignment indexes, which are based on the burst of the Sleeping Beauty literature during technical knowledge diffusion. We took polymerase chain reaction technology as an example, identifying sleeping–waking phenomenon and characteristics of the SBPF in this field, as well as revealing the relationship between SBPF and SBP. Our findings revealed that in the process of technological knowledge diffusion, SBP and their family exhibited significant combined effects and cumulative effects of geographical advantages. In addition, the knowledge burst of SBP is a crucial factor that promotes the formation of the SBPF and can continuously enlarge its influence. This study expands the theoretical framework of technological knowledge diffusion by identifying the Sleeping Beauty phenomenon of technological innovations and provides theoretical and methodology support for identifying advanced and transformative technologies based on patent data.

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Notes

  1. The criteria for defining the awakening of the Sleeping Beauty patent in Hou & Yang (2019): (i) The critical value of the sleep period: to reasonably distinguish the hysteresis discovery critical value of patent texts in different countries, Ti was defined as follows—the total number of invalid patents in a country in the last 20 years is M. After ranking the M number of patents in terms of patent life (in years) in an ascending order, at 1/2 M, the life of the patent text was taken as the critical value Ti of the hysteresis recognition period. In this study, based on 33,250,149 invalid patents in > 100 countries/regions around the world, we calculated the threshold of sleep period as 6. (ii) The standard for the awakening status was the burst intensity of knowledge ≥ 0.5.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the 68th General Program of China Postdoctoral Science Foundation [Grant Number: 2020M683150], National Natural Science Foundation for Young Scholars of China [Grant Number: 72104256], and 2021 Youth Project of Philosophy and Social Sciences of Guangdong Province [Grant Number: GD21YTS02].

Funding

This research was supported by the 68th General Program of China Postdoctoral Science Foundation [Grant Number: 2020M683150], National Natural Science Foundation for Young Scholars of China [Grant Number: 72104256], and 2021 Youth Project of Philosophy and Social Sciences of Guangdong Province [Grant Number: GD21YTS02].

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  1. School of Information Management, SUN Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, People’s Republic of China

    Jianhua Hou, Xiucai Yang, Haoyang Song & Haiyue Yao

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  1. Jianhua Hou
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  2. Xiucai Yang
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Contributions

JH conceived and designed the analysis, performed the analysis, wrote the paper, supervision. XY: conceived and designed the analysis, collected the data, contributed data or analysis tools, performed the analysis, wrote the paper. HS: conceived and designed the analysis, collected the data, contributed data or analysis tools, performed the analysis, wrote the paper. HY: collected the data, contributed data or analysis tools, writing- reviewing and editing.

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Correspondence to Haoyang Song.

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Hou, J., Yang, X., Song, H. et al. Will patent family be dormant? Research on the identification and characteristics of sleeping beauty’s patent family. Scientometrics 128, 5361–5387 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04784-5

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