Proceedings of World Business, Finance and Management Conference
8 - 9 December 2014, Rendezvous Hotel, Auckland, New Zealand, ISBN: 978-1-922069-66-5
The Development Trajectories of Patenting Literature: A Main Path
Analysis Approach
Louis Y.Y. Lu *and John S. Liu **
This paper applies a citation-based key-route main path analysis to explore the development
trajectories of literature in patenting. We retrieve patenting related articles over 1971 to 2013 from ISI
Web of Science (WOS) databases to construct a citation network and then figure out the theoretical and
empirical development of patenting over the past 40 years via main path analysis. We elaborate the
details of the overall development trajectories and provide statistics of top 30 authors and top 20
journals in this field. This paper demonstrates that the methodology adopted in this study is a good
approach to quickly understand the overall development of a specific field and can be applied to other
scientific or technological fields.
Field of Research: Economics and Management
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* Dr. Louis Y. Y. Lu, College of Management, Yuan Ze University, Taiwan. Email: louislu@saturn.yzu.edu.tw
** Dr. John S. Liu, Graduate Institute of Technology Management, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology,
Taiwan. Email: johnliu@mail.ntust.edu.tw