Patent-publication pairs for the detection of knowledge transfer from research to industry: reducing ambiguities with word embeddings and references

The performance of medical research can be viewed and evaluated not only from the perspective of publication output, but also from the perspective of economic exploitability. Patents can represent the exploitation of research results and thus the transfer of knowledge from research to industry. In this study, we set out to identify publication-patent pairs in order to use patents as a proxy for the economic impact of research. To identify these pairs, we matched scholarly publications and patents by comparing the names of authors and investors. To resolve the ambiguities that arise in this name-matching process, we expanded our approach with two additional filter features, one used to assess the similarity of text content, the other to identify common references in the two document types. To evaluate text similarity, we extracted and transformed technical terms from a medical ontology (MeSH) into numerical vectors using word embeddings. We then calculated the results of the two supporting features over an example five-year period. Furthermore, we developed a statistical procedure which can be used to determine valid patent classes for the domain of medicine. Our complete data processing pipeline is freely available, from the raw data of the two document types right through to the validated publication-patent pairs.