Altmetric have announced a new data source – patent citations.
This tracks references to academic sources such as journal articles and books in patents from 9 jurisdictions from 1994 onwards:
- World Intellectual Property Organization
- IP Australia
- German Patent and Trade Mark Office
- Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property
- European Patent Office
- United States Patent and Trademark Office
- National Industrial Property Institute
- Intellectual Property Office of the United Kingdom
- Netherlands Patent Office
A citation in a patent can show that a piece of academic work has contributed to an invention or improvement so shows economic impact.
At present the system only picks up work with a doi, PMID and some urls so it is not comprehensive. Altmetric are working on text mining to improve the number of citations picked up.
If your paper is in Cronfa you will see an altmetric donut in the full record. Patent mentions are shown as dark orange. Click on the donut to see more information – in the case below 2 WIPO patents have cited this piece of work.
You can use the free altmetric.it bookmarklet to check on papers outside Cronfa.