Abstract
This paper reports a bibliometric technique developed in the context of a largely quantitative analysis of national performance in basic research. It exploits the fact that, in some fields, patents contain citations to the basic research literature. This allows one to investigate the impact of that literature on the community of scientists and engineers who write or examine patents, just as conventional citation analysis gives insight to the impact of journal papers on the community of researchers who write papers in journals. The disciplinary focus of this paper is genetics. We describe the history of patenting in genetics and discuss the methodological and cognitive aspects of studying patent citations, before detailing the results of our analysis of 366 genetics patents in the US patent system granted during 1980–1985. The technique can be used to address a variety of issues in science and technology policy and in social studies of science. The context of our study led us to focus on its use in evaluation of national performance in basic research. Our results proved to be compatible with those we obtained by other bibliometric techniques.
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