Patents information for humanities research: Could there be something?

Abstract

Latour and co-authors proposed, in the Science and Technology Translation theory, to target the many SHS (Social and Human Science) questions addressed by social studies of sciences by considering, in complement to traditional academic matters, the complete social environment (political, economic or societal). Patents obviously are a potential primary information source to do so. We propose to extend this considering that recent changes have evolved in our capacity to do so. We propose three preliminary steps: (a) patent documents as providing a structured information source, (b) a patent database as a technical encyclopedia and (c) the recent expansion of the variety of uses and users in patent domains. We underline, furthermore, that minority research in the academic space does effectively use patent information, especially in SHS compared to other disciplines. We deliver an experiment to estimate the amount of data unconsidered by not questioning the huge database of the European Patent Office. By comparatively considering the terminology of the two branches of the Unesco thesaurus, namely the micro thesauri “Social and Human Sciences" and the “Information and Communication Science” branches, we evaluate a database response to the whole vocabulary. An in-depth analysis of one selected concept will complete the study. Results show that patent information may provide a quantity of documents for a wide range of academic research questions, from strategic to state of the art, and position advances aside from the Social Studies of Science. The free open source tool is also a way to practice digital humanities expected skills on real world corpora.

Excessive Use of Mobile Phones and Social Networks Among Colombian University Students

“…Furthermore, based on fieldwork, the results of [50][51][52][53] and [54][55][56][57][58] were corroborated, revealing the diversity of mobile phone usage by participants, even when not connected to the internet. Similarly, as in the work of [59][60][61][62][63][64], it was possible to find discrepancies between the perception of safe technology and social media use [65][66][67][68][69].…”

The innovative dimension of the research training programmes under H2020-MSCA-ITN: a methodological approach to track, measure and analyse innovative aspects and provide policy-feedback conclusions.

“…The selection of the two main indicators (patents and innovations) for the identification of the sample of projects for the analysis may limit the representation of Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) – related projects in the final selected sample. This can be considered as expected for two reasons: i) the generation of patents and similar innovation results are more likely to happen from Innovators that are industrial and/or commercial in their nature ( HRB report, 2023 ); and ii) the use and submission of patents and similar innovations, is traditionally reserved to domains of science and technology, like the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) and medicine/biomedicine/drugs disciplines ( HRB report, 2023 ; Reymond, 2020 ). However, relevant research has shown for example, that an in-depth analysis in patent sources can provide useful information on SSH topics beyond those of mere technological intelligence ( Reyomond, 2020 ).…”