Landslide Research and Technology in Patent Documents

Abstract

AbstractScience, Technology, and Innovation play a crucial role in the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030 (SF DRR). The International Consortium on Landslides (ICL) initiated the Sendai Landslide Partnerships 2015–2025 as a voluntary commitment to SF DRR. In 2020, the ICL launched the Kyoto 2020 Commitment for Global Promotion of Understanding and Reducing Landslide Disaster Risk (KLC 2020) as a follow-up of the Sendai Landslide Partnerships 2015–2025. Closely related to the above-mentioned Innovation are patents as a form of intellectual property rights and are often used as an innovation assessment parameter. This article reports on a study conducted to look at the patent documents that are available in open-access databases in order to evaluate how well they relate to the field of landslide research and technology. Landslide-related patent documents were extracted using different search terms in the patent document titles, abstracts, claims and/or their general text from the Google Patents, using the Espacenet tools from the European Patent Office, and the Derwent Patent Index inside the Web of Science offered by Clarivate Analytics, respectively. The extracted patent documents were analyzed with regard to the applicant respectively inventor affiliation (academic, non-academic, country of affiliation) and to the technical field of a patent using well-known patent classifications. The most active countries claiming landslide-related patents were recognized. Furthermore, review and research articles in SpringerLink and SCOPUS databases were searched to study how often scientific articles are citing landslide-related patents. The results of the study can be summarized as follow: (i) in the Google Patents database there are 15,000 + landslide-related patent documents, and in the Espacenet and the Derwent Innovation index database 5000+, respectively. In the patents titles, abstracts, and claims, processes are more often used to describe the patent than the technology; (ii) the number of technological (non-science) based patents is higher than that of academic (science-based) patents, with some specific field of applications, where the situation is the opposite; (iii) with regard to the different areas of technology to which landslide-related patent documents pertain, the categories “G-Physics” and “E-Fixed constructions” are clearly prevailing: “G” for debris flows and landslides, and “E” for fallings rocks and mudflows; (iv) the majority of landslide-related patents are filled and/or granted in China, followed by Japan and South Korea, USA and EU member countries—five major emerging economies (called BRICS) are outperforming developed countries, with a very prevailing Chinese contribution; (v) only a fraction of the order of a few one-in-thousands of landslide-related patents documents are cited in journal review and research articles.