Monitoring emerging technologies for technology planning using technical keyword based analysis from patent data

•We propose technical keyword-based analysis to monitor emerging technologies.•The proposed approach applies a term frequency-inverse document frequency.•The proposed approach uses the concept of distributional similarity.•An approach based on technical keywords is suggested for patent analysis.

This paper proposes technical keyword-based analysis of patents to monitor emerging technologies, and uses a keyword-based model in contents-based patent analysis. This study also presents methods to automatically select keywords and to identify the relatedness among them. After using text-mining tools and techniques to identify technical keywords, a technical keyword-context matrix is constructed. The relatedness between pairs of keywords is then identified in a transformation of this matrix. Patent documents are clustered by using a hierarchical clustering algorithm based on patent document vectors. As a result, emerging technologies can be monitored by identifying clusters composed of technical keywords. A case study of mechanisms of electron transfer in electrochemical glucose biosensors is given to demonstrate how the proposed method can monitor emerging technologies.