Identifying author-inventors from Spain: methods and a first insight into results
Stéphane Maraut & Catalina Martínez
The aim of this paper is to describe a matching and disambiguation methodology for the identification of author-inventors located in the same country. It aims to maximize precision and recall rates by taking into account national name writing customs in the name matching stage and by including a recursive validation step in the person disambiguation stage. An application to the identification of Spanish author-inventors is described in detail, where all SCOPUS 2003-2008 publications of Spanish authors are matched to all 1978-2009 EPO applications with Spanish inventors. Using this data, we identify 4,194 Spanish author-inventors. A first look at their patenting and publication patterns reveal that Spanish author-inventors make quite a significant contribution to the overall country’s scientific and technological production in the time periods considered: 27% of all EPO patent applications invented in Spain and 15% of all SCOPUS scientific articles authored in Spain, with important differences across fields and excluding journals in non-technologically relevant fields.