Preliminary Study on Why University Researchers Do Not Utilize Patent Information for Their Academic Research in the Field of Science and Engineering in Japan

Generally speaking, university researchers in the field of science and engineering do not utilize patent information for their academic research activities, and mostly they depend on academic research publications to insist on their research originality. On the other hand, there is much volume of technical information in the patent publications along with the rapid increase and the absolute big number of patent applications in the world. As a first step of this research, we tried to grasp the researchers' needs what kind of patent information is requested for their academic research at universities, depending on the research processes in the field of science and engineering. We made preliminary interviews to the limited number of researchers to extract indispensable factors together with providing patent information searching systems, and we tried to understand the academic researcher's thinking in the field of science and engineering at university, for the purpose to design our future questionnaires as a next step. We positioned this research as a preliminary study before designing the challenging research framework which will be started based on the discussions in this paper. We started this research as a qualitative research to find out academic researcher's thinking, before entering a quantitative research approaches in the future.