A novel approach for exploring technological development trajectories

Abstract

This paper adopts a novel approach to explore the development trajectories of automatic identification technologies by analyzing various main paths on the patent data. We retrieved the citation data on patents in automatic identification techniques from the database of USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office) and then built the citation network. Several main path analyses were applied on the citation network to explore the major technological development trajectories. The results clearly identify the major technological revolution paths and trends. This approach is not only useful for this application, but also very helpful for other technological fields.

Tracing best semantic path using co-citation proximity analysis

“…al. 2006;Verspagen, 2007;Mina et al, 2007;Carlero-Medina & Noyons, 2008;Lucio-Arias & Leydesdorff, 2008;Harris et al 2009;Lu et al 2012) has arisen. This paper measures the most similar semantic path in the citation thread using optimized language models.…”

Optimizing Research Progress Trajectories with Semantic Power Graphs

“…Many researchers have applied the main path analysis method since then to investigate the developmental trajectories of various science and technology domains using bibliographical citation data, patent citation data, or both [2,[4][5][6][7][8]11]. Hummon and Doreian [9] addressed the same issue by introducing main path analysis.…”

“…An earlier work on patent data [4] integratse social network analysis and main path analysis to explore the technological development trajectories of automatic identification techniques. The method, however, has some limitations, as it either offers a complex "network of main paths," as suggested in Hummon et al [10], or one and only the most significant development path.…”