Application of Patent Networks to Information Retrieval: A Preliminary Study

Information pertaining to the patent system is scattered not only across the patent domain, but also across other scientific and regulatory domains. In recent years, there has been an explosive growth in scientific and regulatory documents related to the patent system. In this project, the use of networks and network analyses is applied to an Information Retrieval (IR) problem in the patent domain. First a patent citation network is developed and tested. Second, a text-based semantic network of patents is developed based on a use case “erythropoietin”. An algorithm is proposed which attempts to identify the important patents in the network. Keywords-patent, citation, semantic, network, information retrieval, search, similarity.