New Indicators of the Technological Impact of Scientific Production

Purpose:Building upon pioneering work by Francis Narin and others,a new methodological approach to assessing the technological impact of scientific research is presented.Design/methodology/approach:It is based on the analysis of citations made in patent families included in the PATSTAT database that is to scientific papers indexed in Scopus.Findings:An advanced citation matching procedure is applied to the data in order to construct two indicators of technological impact:on the citing(patent)side,the country/region in which protection is sought and a patent family’s propensity to cite scientific papers are taken into account,and on the cited(paper)side,a relative citation rate is defined for patent citations to papers that is similar to the scientific paper-to-paper citation rate in classical bibliometrics.Research limitations:The results are limited by the available data,in our case Scopus and PATSTAT,and especially by the lack of standardization of references in patents.This required a matching procedure that is neither trivial nor exact.Practical implications:Results at the country/region,document type,and publication age levels are presented.The country/region-level results in particular reveal features that have remained hidden in analyses of straight counts.Especially notable is that the rankings of some Asian countries/regions move upwards when the proposed normalized indicator of technological impact is applied as against the case with straight counts of patent citations to those countries/regions’published papers.Originality/value:In our opinion,the level of sophistication of the indicators proposed in the current paper is unparalleled in the scientific literature,and provides a solid basis for the assessment of the technological impact of scientific research in countries/regions and institutions.

Modeling the dynamics of firms' technological impact

Recent studies in complexity science have uncovered temporal regularities in the dynamics of impact along scientific and other creative careers, but they did not extend the obtained insights to firms. In this paper, we show that firms' technological impact patterns cannot be captured by the state-of-the-art dynamical models for the evolution of scientists' research impact, such as the Q model. Therefore, we propose a time-varying returns model which integrates the empiricallyobserved relation between patent order and technological impact into the Q model. The proposed model can reproduce the timing pattern of firms' highest-impact patents accurately. Our results shed light on modeling the differences behind the impact dynamics of researchers and firms.

Impacts of Migration on Urban Environmental Pollutant Emissions in China: A Comparative Perspective

In recent years,researchers have devoted considerable attention to identifying the causes of urban environmental pollution.To determine whether migrant populations significantly affect urban environments,we examined the relationship between urban environmental pollutant emissions and migrant populations at the prefectural level using data obtained for 90 Chinese cities evidencing net in-migration.By dividing the permanent populations of these cities into natives and migrants in relation to the population structure,we constructed an improved Stochastic Impacts by Regression on Population,Affluence and Technology model(STIRPAT)that included not only environmental pollutant emission variables but also variables on the cities’attributes.We subsequently conducted detailed analyses of the results of the models to assess the impacts of natives and migrants on environmental pollutant emissions.The main findings of our study were as follows:1)Migrant populations have significant impacts on environmental emissions both in terms of their size and concentration.Specifically,migrant populations have negative impacts on Air Quality Index(AQI)as well as PM2.5 emissions and positive impacts on emissions of NO2 and CO2.2)The impacts of migrant populations on urban environmental pollutant emissions were 8 to 30 times weaker than that of local populations.3)Urban environmental pollutant emissions in different cities differ significantly according to variations in the industrial structures,public transportation facilities,and population densities.

New Internet Trends and Technologies and Their Impacts on Telecom Industry

With never-ending changes and improvements and an increasing industrial scale of the Internet, the emerging new application trends, such as social networking, network video, intelligent search and mobile Internet, and new Internet technologies, such as Mashup, artificial intelligence, grid computing and open platform, are significantly influencing the Internet industrial structure. Moreover, the rapid development of the Internet and the convergence of the Internet and telecom networks, especially the development of mobile Internet, are giving the telecom industry a shock. This shock will certainly change the structure of the telecom industry, gradually break the monopoly status of telecom operators, shift the telecom emphasis to services and contents, and enhance the importance of terminal vendors in the industrial chain.