Identifying author–inventors from Spain: methods and a first insight into results

The purpose of this paper is twofold: methodological and empirical. Methodologically, we describe a matching and disambiguation procedure for the identification of author–inventors (researchers who publish and patent) located in the same country. Our methodology aims to maximize precision and recall rates by taking into account national name writing customs and country-specific dictionaries for person and institution names (academic and non-academic) in the name matching stage and by including a recursive validation step in the person disambiguation stage. An application of this methodology to the identification of Spanish author–inventors is described in detail. Empirically, we present the first results of applying the described methodology to the matching of all SCOPUS 2003–2008 publications of Spanish authors to all 1978–2009 EPO applications with Spanish inventors. Using this data, we identify 4,194 Spanish author–inventors. A first look at their patenting and publication patterns reveals that they make quite a significant contribution to the country’s overall scientific and technological production in the time period considered: 27 % of all EPO patent applications invented in Spain and 15 % of all SCOPUS publications authored in Spain, excluding non-technological disciplines. To our knowledge, this is the first time that a large scale identification of author–inventors from Spain has been done, with no limitation in terms of fields, regions or types of institutions. We also make available online for scientific use an anonymized subset of the database (patent applications invented by authors affiliated to Spanish public universities).