Evaluation of the Industrial and Social Impacts of Science and Technology Using Patents and News Articles

In scientometrics and citation analysis, several measures for evaluating the industrial relevance or the impact of academic research fields have been proposed. What seems to be lacking, however, is that these measures could not evaluate the recent industrial relevance or impact of each field, because most of them rely on citations of research papers in patents and vice versa. In this paper, we attempt to evaluate the industrial and social impact of research fields using document classification techniques. Our method classifies research papers and news articles using systems including the International Patent Classification (IPC) and the KAKEN classification index. Then it evaluates the industrial and social impact of each field by comparing the number of research papers with the number of patents or articles in the IPC categories and the projects funded in each KAKEN category.