Common citation analysis and technology overlap factor: An empirical investigation of litigated patents using network analysis

Abstract

Companies incur huge costs in filing and defending patent lawsuits. A part of the problem arises from the fact that companies do not have a comprehensive understanding of the patents that they have cited and the patents that have cited their patents. By empirically analyzing the forward and backward citations of a set of litigated patents in the smart phone industry, we provide a method for profiling patents and identifying citation patterns. Our results show that while some patents share common forward and backward citations, others do not share any backward citations but share a lot of forward citations. We hypothesize that this maybe an indication of the convergence of different types of technologies. We also propose a new metric - Technology Overlap Factor - that can help in identifying convergence. In doing so, we provide a preliminary framework for further investigation and for building a patent analysis software system. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.