A further step forward in measuring journals’ technological factor

Abstract

A new indicator of technological impact of a scientific journal is presented, based on citations in patent applications to papers published in that journal. Key characteristics are that patent citations are aggregated by patent family, and that not all citations are considered equal. To each family citation a weight is assigned that is proportional to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the countries in which protection is requested, to take into account the costs and expected benefits of patenting, and inversely proportional to the number of cited references in a patent family, as a way to correct for differences in citation frequencies in patent applications among technological fields. Around one third of journals indexed in Scopus have at least one citation from patent applications in a 5-year citation window. The distribution of the technological impact scores among journals can be modelled as a power law distribution, with the slope being a little smoother than that of common scientific impact indicators SJR and JIF. However, the correlations between technological and scientific impact indicators are mostly low or moderate, which shows that they measure quite different aspects of journal or research performance.