What are patents?
Patents are a form of intellectual property, and are a set of exclusive rights granted by a state or intergovernmental organisation to an inventor or assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for detailed public disclosure of an invention.
Where do Altmetric source patents data?
Patents data are supplied to Altmetric by IFI Claims (via a feed that comes from Dimensions). Currently, our dataset covers patents from 1994 onwards.
Altmetric manually import new patents data on a fortnightly basis from Dimensions.
How do Altmetric extract references to research from patents?
Altmetric searches patents for links to publications. We then follow the links to the relevant publisher page, DOI link or PubMed URL (for example) and link the patent reference to the output’s Altmetric Details Page. We also text mine the document to search for free text references to research outputs.
What patent offices are covered?
Further details about patent offices covered and available data for patents can be found on the Dimensions Support page: Information about Patent data in Dimensions.
How do patents contribute to the Altmetric Attention Score?
Patents contribute to the Altmetric Attention Score. In the data obtained from IFI Claims, each patent is assigned to a jurisdiction. The jurisdiction is used by Altmetric to determine the contribution of patents to the score for a particular research output. Specifically, each jurisdiction counts for a flat score of 3 towards the Altmetric Attention Score. Because there are only 9 possible jurisdictions in the IFI Claims patent data, then the maximum contribution that patents could make to any research output’s Altmetric Attention Score is 27.
Do patents data appear in the Altmetric Explorer and Altmetric APIs?
Patents data is available within the Explorer. You can sort research outputs by the number of patent citations, browse in the Results Analysis, view patents mentions counts in the Summary chart, the Mentions tab, and the Journal and Collections tab.
Any saved searches containing research outputs that have been mentioned by patents also display the patents data in email alerts and shareable reports. Mentions from patents can be exported from the Mentions tab, and also viewed in Altmetric APIs. CSV exports also contain patent mention counts.
Patents on the Altmetric Details Page
On an Altmetric Details Page, the Patents tab lists mentions by time of publication in descending order, with the most recent mentions available at the top of the page. You can see the patent title, the application ID and the registration body. Clicking on a mention will send you to the patent page on the Dimensions platform.
Patent mentions appear as dark orange in the Altmetric donut.
