Visualization of patents and papers in terahertz technology: a comparative study

Terahertz technology is one of the most promising research areas in the 21st century. In this work, we intend to compare the research status quo on terahertz technology between 1990 and 2010 using knowledge domain visualization techniques. Our data consists of 633 patents retrieved from Aureka management platform and 10,344 journal articles indexed in the ISI web of knowledge. Our analysis is a combination of two information visualization tools for analysis, Aureka and CiteSpace. Aureka is allowed for the analysis of patents filed/granted each year, priority country, inventors, assignees, citation counting, and cluster analysis, while networks of co-authors, countries, institutions, document co-citation networks and document co-citation clusters, are performed by CiteSpace. This research provides a comprehensive domain visualization map of innovation and knowledge in the area of terahertz technology. Our result shows that Aureka and CiteSpace are two promising visualization approaches to analyze patents and papers in any given field.