Abstract

This study analyzes the relationship of citations appearing in the patent data to understand knowledge transfers and impacts between patent documents in the field of pharmaceutical research. Patent data were collected from a website, Google Patents. The top 25 assignees were selected by searching for patent documents related to pharmaceutical research. We identify the citation relationships between assignees, then calculate and compare the values of h-index and derived indicators by using the number of citations and rank for each document of each assignee. As a result, in the case of pharmaceutical research, the assignee, such as ‘Pfizer, MIT, and Abbott’ shows a high impact. Among the five bibliometric indicators, the g-index and hS-index show similar results, and the indicators are the most related to the rankings of Total Citation Frequency, Cites per Patents, and Maximum Citation Frequency. In addition, it is highly related to the five indicators in the order of Total Citation Frequency, Cites per Patents, and Maximum Citation Frequency. In some cases, it is difficult to make an accurate comparison with Cites per Patents alone, which is previously known to indicate the technological influence of patent assignees.