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Bridge strongly or focus – An analysis of bridging patents in four application fields of carbon fiber reinforcements

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  • Moehrle, Martin G.
  • Frischkorn, Jonas

Abstract

The major purpose of patents is to protect technical inventions. As a rule of thumb, an inventor (and the patent attorney) should aim to achieve the broadest possible scope of protection for the invention. Our basic research question is, whether this rule proves helpful under all circumstances. We aim to answer this question by means of an informetric approach, focusing on bridging patents between several application fields of a technology. Prior work has identified patents that build bridges between two or more application fields of a technology. So far, these bridging patents have only marginally been analyzed to obtain an idea of how the “bridging” intensity is achieved. One purpose of our paper is to fill this gap and characterize patents of this kind by means of an approach based on text mining, claim analysis, and forward citation analysis. We select the case of carbon fiber reinforced plastics as an example, focusing on four application fields for which we develop a basic patent set. We identify in this patent set semantic anchor points, and - subsequently - bridging patents of different intensity. We expand our patent set by accepting a slightly lower precision level, which leads to a considerably higher recall value. We find that bridging patents comprise a greater number as well as a higher complexity of claims than non-bridging patents. Interestingly, the relationship between the intensity of bridging as an independent variable and forward citations as a dependent variable is described by a u-shaped curve. This answers the basic research question in the way that when writing a patent application, inventors should bridge strongly or focus.

Suggested Citation

  • Moehrle, Martin G. & Frischkorn, Jonas, 2021. "Bridge strongly or focus – An analysis of bridging patents in four application fields of carbon fiber reinforcements," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 15(2).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:infome:v:15:y:2021:i:2:s1751157721000092
    DOI: 10.1016/j.joi.2021.101138
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