The citation from patents to scientific output revisited: a new approach to the matching Patstat / Scopus

Patents include citations, both to other patents and to documents that are not patents (NPL, Non-patent literature). Non-patent literature (NPL) includes articles published in scientific journals. The technological impact of scientific works can be studied through the citations they receive from patents, just like the scientific impact of articles can be analyzed through the citations. The NPL references included in patents are far from being standardized, so determining which scientific article they refer to is not a trivial task. This paper presents a procedure for linking the NPL references of the patents collected in the Patstat database and the scientific works indexed in the Scopus bibliographic database. This procedure consists of two phases: a broad generation of candidate couples and another phase of validation of couples, and it has been implemented with reasonably good results at a low cost.