A Comparative Study On Collaboration Networks Of Papers And Patents

Papers and patents are the two main outputs of scientific research. Scientific papers and patents are parallel and comparable.The study collects papers and patents of selected eight herbal chemicals based on the data source of SciFinder in the time span of2003to2012, using bibliometric method and Social Network Analysis (SNA) to analyze the co-authorship and co-assigneeship of papers and patents.The main conclusions are:As to the bibliometric analysis, the collaboration of papers is more frequently, of a larger scale and a wider range than that of patents.As to network analysis, papers collaboration networks are of a large scale, with more times of cooperation than patents collaboration networks. The density of patents collaboration networks is far larger than that of papers collaboration networks, which means even though patents collaboration networks are of a smaller scale, their collaboration is closer than that of papers. Moreover, the average path lengths of the two kinds of collaboration networks are less than10, which indicate that they present the network characteristics of Small world. The node degrees of papers collaboration networks distribute widely, while those of patents collaboration networks are comparatively concentrated. Besides, both kinds of networks present the characteristics of scale-free networks.The components of papers collaboration networks are far more, and larger scaled than that of patents collaboration networks.The study provides a method to compare papers and patents collaboration networks, and it approaches some conclusion which indicates the differences and inner links between co-authorship and co-assigneeship of a certain substance. The study aims to provide a new perspective of further research on collaboration networks between papers and patents.