IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/worpat/v29y2007i4p308-316.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Understanding and customizing stopword lists for enhanced patent mapping

Author

Listed:
  • Blanchard, Antoine

Abstract

While the use of patent mapping tools is growing, the 'black-box' systems involved do not generally allow the user to interfere further than the preliminary retrieval of documents. Except, that is, for one thing: the stopword list, i.e. the list of 'noise' words to be ignored, which can be modified to one's liking and dramatically impacts the final output and analysis. This paper invokes information science and computer science to provide clues for a better understanding of the stopword lists' origin and purpose, and how they fit in the mapping algorithm. Further, it stresses the need for stopword lists that depend on the document corpus analyzed. Thus, the analyst is invited to add and remove stopwords--or even, in order to avoid inherent biases, to use algorithms that can automatically create ad hoc stopword lists.

Suggested Citation

  • Blanchard, Antoine, 2007. "Understanding and customizing stopword lists for enhanced patent mapping," World Patent Information, Elsevier, vol. 29(4), pages 308-316, December.
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:worpat:v:29:y:2007:i:4:p:308-316
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0172-2190(07)00044-0
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Christian Sternitzke & Isumo Bergmann, 2009. "Similarity measures for document mapping: A comparative study on the level of an individual scientist," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 78(1), pages 113-130, January.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:worpat:v:29:y:2007:i:4:p:308-316. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/654/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.