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How do open patent search engines handle citations to scientific literature, and what does this tell us about the science–technology interface? This post reviews a comparative study of Google Patents and Lens, uncovering what each platform offers — and still lacks — when it comes to making scientific impact visible through patents.

Open Access is often discussed in relation to journal publications, preprints, and data. Yet patents, despite being a crucial part of the innovation ecosystem, remain slightly outside the mainstream conversation on open science infrastructures. While I’ve worked in the past with several open patent repositories, mainly those provided by patent offices, I never actually reflected on how patents are archived, exposed, or made discoverable in global open access platforms such as OpenDOAR. Given the increasing importance of …

How closely are patents tied to scientific research? In this post, I explore Marx & Fuegi’s dataset linking global patents to academic papers.
With more than 22 million patent–paper connections, the study opens new pathways for innovation research.
As someone who worked with millions of patent links in my PhD, this paper hit particularly close to home.

This post explores the insights from Patent bibliometrics. The authors outline how patent data, when analysed through performance, technology, value, and collaboration indicators, can help organisations spot trends, assess competitiveness, and anticipate future developments. Through a case study of nanotechnology patents in Spain, they demonstrate how visual tools and structured patent information can powerfully support competitive and technological intelligence, while also highlighting key limitations of the method.

Patent databases are crucial for tracking technological innovation. This paper compares six major systems, from free tools like Google Patents to premium platforms such as Orbit Intelligence, showing how the gap between free and paid solutions is narrowing.