Patenting activity in the food safety sector

Research on science and technology policy has heavily relied on patent data. However, relatively few studies of food safety patent activity appear in scholarly literature. This paper provides a discussion on patents as a measure of new knowledge generation in the food safety sector. In so doing, there are inherent challenges to identifying a research taxonomy for this multidisciplinary area. To overcome these challenges, the paper uses a natural language approach that can be applied to other research areas where boundaries of fields are not well defined.