![\"\"](\"/assets/images/google_patent_wikipathways.png\")
Division 1 of our Institute of Nutrition and Translational Research in Metabolism\n(NUTRIM) held a meeting last week which had a panel discussion on the use of\npatents to bring research to the market, aimed at PhD candidates of the institute.\nPatents are one of the routes to make research output more sustainable. For\nexample, the research output into a new method to study something or make something\noften needs the development into a product. For example, a new multivariate\nstatistics method may need a graphical user interface.\nAs such, the “development” after the research (think, R&D) is often part of the\nsustainability of some research.
\n\nPatents, trade secrets, and precompetitive collaboration are three methods that\nhave been used to make research output sustainable. Of course, in addition to\nthe fourth, which is simply the published journal article or book chapter.
\n\nThis led to the notion that PhD research, if it is to benefit (the Dutch) society,\nthen if needs to get used. There needs to be a market of users. This could be\nother scholars that use the method, use the data (see also\nCitation Typing Ontology\nthat captures such reuse), or could be a product sold to other businesses or\neven a consumer market product.
\n\nFiling a patent is often seen as research having societal impact. It captures\nthe notion that one or more people trust the impact enough to invest a considerable\namount of money. BTW, patents allow others to reuse your knowledge, to extend\nit, and to modify it. It is just that the patent limits how you use the results\nof that reuse commercially.
\n\nBut patents are interesting in another way. A mention of your research means that\nthe people that cited your work in their patent found your research valuable\nenough to list it as support of their patent. This is similar to getting cited\nin another journal article (or book (chapter)), but much closer to society.
\n\nTherefore, if you are interested to learn whhich of the research you do, and the output\nof that research, has an impact on society, scanning patent literature for citations to\nyour work or the work of the research group you work in, can give surprising\nresults. Worst case, it gives you ideas of how the research may benefit society.
\n\nNowadays, there are multiple patent search engines and sometimes the do a lot\nof text mining, e.g. to find patents that mention a certain chemical structures.\nBut a general search engine like Google Patents\nwill already to you a great service. If you search here on terms related to\nyour research, or your last name, you can find results. If your research project\nhas a unique name, this will, of course, greatly simplify the search.
\n\nFor example, when I search for WikiPathways (our biological WikiPathways\nknowledge graph), it finds over 200 patents that mention it.\nWikiPathways is an Open Science project and there is no patent on our approach,\nbut what this project has done, turns out to be important for SMEs enough that\nthey base a patent on it. Of course, the role is often just supportive, just\nlike a journal article citation. This is what a results page may look like:
\n\n
There are also tools that make available text mining results that found which\narticles have been cited in which patent. Altmetric.com\nis one of them. For many articles (DOIs) they provide information on where that\narticle (DOI) is mentioned. And they provide a donut to visualize that\nattention.\nOver time, the diversity of what mentions they find has gone down, and new\nmedia are not added frequently and Mastodon is a big one missing, but patents\nis still one of the supported resources.
\n\nFor any DOI you can look up what data Altmetric.com has using this URL\npattern (the example is for the DOI 10.1039/D3DD00069A):
\n\nhttps://altmetric.com/details/doi/10.1039/D3DD00069A\nMaastricht University users can use our cris\nwhich provides an HTML page listing all your articles (e.g.\nmine)\nand each has a Altmetric.com donut, which an orange band for patents:
\n\n![\"\"](\"/assets/images/altmetrics_patents.png\")
We can see here that this article is cited in three patents. You can click\nthe donut to find which patents those are. The cris overview page gives\na quick look which articles (or research lines) are cited in patents.
\n\nAlso look out for the purple bands, which reflect citations in policy documents,\nwhich reflect another kind of societal impact.
\n\nFor early career researchers with few articles and not a lot of time to\nget cited in patents (or policies), it can also be useful to look at articles\nthat your work is based on, e.g. those of your supervisor.
", "summary": "Division 1 of our Institute of Nutrition and Translational Research in Metabolism (NUTRIM) held a meeting last week which had a panel discussion on the use of patents to bring research to the market, aimed at PhD candidates of the institute. Patents are one of the routes to make research output more sustainable. For example, the research output into a new method to study something or make something often needs the development into a product. For example, a new multivariate statistics method may need a graphical user interface. As such, the “development” after the research (think, R&D) is often part of the sustainability of some research.", "image": "https://chem-bla-ics.linkedchemistry.info/assets/images/google_patent_wikipathways.png", "date_published": "2024-09-23T00:00:00+00:00", "date_modified": "2024-09-23T00:00:00+00:00", "authors": [ { "name": "Egon Willighagen", "url": "https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7542-0286" } ] } ] }