A novel approach for exploring technological development trajectories

This paper adopts a novel approach to explore the development trajectories of automatic identification technologies by analyzing various main paths on the patent data. We retrieved the citation data on patents in automatic identification techniques from the database of USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office) and then built the citation network. Several main path analyses were applied on the citation network to explore the major technological development trajectories. The results clearly identify the major technological revolution paths and trends. This approach is not only useful for this application, but also very helpful for other technological fields.