The Role of Articles in Science–Technology Relationship: A Topic Analysis of Non-patent Literature (NPL) References

Patents with non-patent literature (NPL) references indicate how the link between science and technology interact. Using topic modeling, this paper investigated the thematic relationship between patents and their cited articles in the field of Nanotechnology. For this purpose, patents in the field of nanotechnology (IPC Class: B82) were obtained from the United States Patent and Trademark Office from 1985 to 2019. Then, NPL references listed in “Other References” section of the patents was extracted and abstract of the NPL references was retrieved from Scopus database. R software, topic modeling, and Latent Dirichlet Allocation algorithm were used to analyze the data. Results showed that most of the subclasses in Nanotechnology use few NPL references and are more dependent on patents. In total, NPL references account for only 36% of patent citations. The topics of the NPL references in this field (nanotechnology) belonged to six categories: Physics, Electricity, Chemistry, Cellular and Molecular Biology, Medicine, and Nanotechnology. Consequently, it seems that nanotechnology patents are more technology-driven, and a medium to low relationship exists between science and nanotechnology. The topic modeling of NPL references uncovered that nanotechnology patents have been more influenced by non-nano scientific.