Patent analysis has become important for management as it offers timely and valuable information to evaluate R&D performance and identify the prospects of patents. This study explores the scattering patterns of patent impact based on citations in 3 distinct technological areas, the liquid crystal, semiconductor, and drug technological areas, to identify the core patents in each area. The research follows the approach from Bradford's law, which equally divides total citations into 3 zones. While the result suggests that the scattering of patent citations corresponded with features of Bradford's law, the proportion of patents in the 3 zones did not match the proportion as proposed by the law. As a result, the study shows that the distributions of citations in all 3 areas were more concentrated than what Bradford's law proposed. The Groos (1967) droop was also presented by the scattering of patent citations, and the growth rate of cumulative citation decreased in the third zone.

Patent citation can be viewed as an indicator for technical impact and technical invention. Highly cited patents represent the “prior art” of many issued patents and are likely to contain significant technological advances. Enterprises that produced these highly cited patents may influence industrial technological development. Because the technologically intensive industries require technology innovation to constantly adapt to the changing environment, any enterprises can disrupt the market and produce high impact technologies. This study aims to explore highly cited technologies in the ICT industry and uses social network analysis and knowledge-based characteristics to investigate the transitions of highly-impact-technology enterprises. The longitudinal analysis of technological leaders examines competitive tendency in specific fields to anchor the positions of the enterprises. This study proposes a different viewpoint to analyze highly-impact-technology enterprises based on social network perspective and knowledge-based characteristics.

Abstract We characterize the research performance of a large number of institutions in a two‐dimensional coordinate system based on the shapes of their h‐cores so that their relative performance can be conveniently observed and compared. The 2D distribution of these institutions is then utilized (1) to categorize the institutions into a number of qualitative groups revealing the nature of their performance, and (2) to determine the position of a specific institution among the set of institutions. The method is compared with some major h‐type indices and tested with empirical data using clinical medicine as an illustrative case. The method is extensible to the research performance evaluation at other aggregation levels such as researchers, journals, departments, and nations.

This paper proposes a design methodology for the synthesis of statically balanced planar articulated manipulators through direct spring installation. The proposed method can determine all admissible configurations of spring installation with a given planar articulated manipulator. The fundamental principle for gravity balance of a conservative system of spring-gravity is formulated by a stiffness block matrix, wherein each component matrix implies interacting forces among the links. The distribution of nonzero-component matrices can be related to a type of spring configuration. The minimum number of springs that are required for a statically balanced manipulator can be further determined, based on the number of design parameters and the number of simultaneous equations derived from the zero-component matrices of stiffness block matrix. By the representation of conventional adjacency matrix for connectivity of springs among the links, five characteristics are identified to enumerate all admissible spring configurations with a minimum number of springs. Spring configurations for the statically balanced articulated manipulators with up to four degrees of freedom are obtained and illustrated schematically. An index function for the evaluation of the robustness of such a statically balanced articulated manipulator with respect to each spring configuration is also proposed.

The counting of papers and citations is fundamental to the assessment of research productivity and impact. In an age of increasing scientific collaboration across national borders, the counting of papers produced by collaboration between multiple countries, and citations of such papers, raises concerns in country-level research evaluation. In this study, we compared the number counts and country ranks resulting from five different counting methods. We also observed inflation depending on the method used. Using the 1989 to 2008 physics papers indexed in ISI's Web of Science as our sample, we analyzed the counting results in terms of paper count (research productivity) as well as citation count and citation–paper ratio (CP ratio) based evaluation (research impact). The results show that at the country-level assessment, the selection of counting method had only minor influence on the number counts and country rankings in each assessment. However, the influences of counting methods varied between paper count, citation count, and CP ratio based evaluation. The findings also suggest that the popular counting method (whole counting) that gives each collaborating country one full credit may not be the best counting method. Straight counting that accredits only the first or the corresponding author or fractional counting that accredits each collaborator with partial and weighted credit might be the better choices.

Using a database of 1.4 million papers indexed by Web of Science, we examined the global trends in publication inequality and international collaboration in physics. The publication output and citations received by authors hosted in each country were taken into account. Although inequality decreased over time, further progress toward equality has somewhat abated in recent years. The skewedness of the global distribution in publication output was shown to be correlated with article impact, that is, the inequality is more significant in articles of higher impact. It was also observed that, despite the trend toward more equalitarian distribution, scholarly participation in physics is still determined by a select group. Particularly noteworthy has been China's rapid growth in publication outputs and a gradual improvement in its impact. Finally, the data also suggested regional differences in scientific collaboration. A distinctively high concentration of transnational collaboration and publication performance was found among EU countries.

The principle of inertia match is extended from one-degree-of-freedom (DOF) systems to multi-DOF systems. Based on the concept of maximum acceleration capacity, a methodology for the determination of gear ratios in geared robotic mechanisms is developed. It is found that, in the optimum design, the mass inertia matrix of the input links reflected at the joint-space is equal to that of the major links, and the maximum acceleration capacity is independent of the gear train arrangement. Several two-DOF geared robotic mechanisms are used as design examples to illustrate the principle. Using this methodology, mechanisms can be designed to yield optimum dynamic performance.>