Patent and Publications Trends in Breast Cancer Chemotherapy

Objective: To analyse multi-source data including publications and patents, and try to draw the whole landscape of the research and development community in the field of chemotherapy for breast cancer.

Materials and Methods: Publications and patents were collect from the Web of science and databases of the top five patent offices of the world, respectively. Bibliometric methodologies and technology are used to investigate publications/patents, their contents and relationships.

Results: 29237 items published and 16053 patents from 1997 to 2016 including “chemotherapy for breast cancer” were retrieve. The top five countries in global publication and patents share were USA, Germany, Italy, China and France. The universities and enterprises of USA had the highest amount of publication and patents.

Conclusions: The above results show that global research in the field of chemotherapy for breast cancer is increasing and the main participants in this field are USA and Canada in America, China, Japan and South Korea in Asia, and Germany, Italy, and France in Europe, and Australia in Oceania. In addition, this article demonstrates the usefulness of bibliometrics to address key evaluation questions and define future areas of research.

Keywords: breast cancer; chemotherapy; patents; publications; bibliometric.