Patent research in the field of library and information science: Less useful or difficult to explore?

Patents and relevant topics are gaining momentum in economic analysis and scientific research with the rapid global intellectual property filings growth. However, a corresponding increase seems to be unspectacular in patent research publications, especially under the category of information science and library science. This paper provided a retrospect to the existing studies on patents collected from web of science and emphatically characterized the current situation through performing a series of bibliometric analysis. Prominent authors and institutions from mainland China, Taiwan and Belgium have carried out various studies on patent separately or jointly. Topics involved in 884 journal papers are reclassified from perspectives of the development, application and analysis of patents based on the results of keyword co-occurrence and typical publications in each stage. The final, but the novel part of this study was a sentence-by-sentence analysis of conclusive and citing ideas of recent publications, for tracing problems and potential researchable topics and indicating that patent research still has more spaces to move up.