Do academic inventors have diverse interests?

Academic inventors bridge science and technology, and have attracted increasing attention. However, little is known about whether they have more diverse research interests than researchers with a single role, and whether their important position for science–technology interactions correlates with their diverse interests. For this purpose, we describe a rule-based approach for matching and identifying academic inventors, and an author interest discovery model with credit allocation schemes is utilized to measure the diversity of each researcher’s interests. Finally, extensive empirical results on the DrugBank dataset provide several valuable insights. Contrary to our intuitive expectation, the research interests of academic inventors are the least diverse, while those of authors are the most. In addition, the important position of the researchers has a certain relation with the diversity of research interests. More specifically, the degree of centrality has a significant positive correlation with the diversity of interests, and the constraint presents a significant negative correlation. A significant weaker negative correlation can also be observed between the diversity of research interests of academic inventors and their closeness centrality. The normalized betweenness centrality seems be independent from interest diversity. These conclusions help understand the mechanisms of the important position of academic inventors for science–technology interactions, from the perspective of research interests.