A novel approach to identify the major research themes and development trajectory: The case of patenting research

This paper presents a novel approach to identify the major research themes and development trajectory of a targeted field and takes the case of patenting research as an example. Edge-between clustering and key-route main path analysis are employed to complementarily accomplish the task. This study retrieves patenting related articles covering 1970 to 2013 from Web of Science (WOS) and constructs the citation network among them. The edge-betweenness clustering technique and key-route main path analysis are then applied to identify the major research themes and development trajectories of patenting research. Eight major research themes are identified: 'citation network analysis', 'patent law', 'patent valuation', 'academic patenting', 'gene patenting', 'patent policy', 'patent protection', and 'technology analysis'. The linkage among these eight research themes is exhibited, along with a presentation of the statistics of top influential journals and authors. This study demonstrates that the approach used herein is a powerful way to determine the major research themes and development trajectories of a target academic field. The approach is also applicable to any other data with citation relationships.