A chart I put up on the weblog cited Derwent's World Patents Index as a source. It is found at Thomson.com, and it has information regarding 31.66 million patent documents. (Okay, let's future proof this--in 2012, will it have information on 63 million patent documents?)
They charge to get in and look around, so I'm hovering on the periphery, seeing if I can find more meta-data about the database. For example, an article titled 'Open access to the medical literature: How much content is available in published journals?' by Marie McVeigh and James Pringle, published in 2005, indicates that about 20% of medical literature published in 174 journals since 1992 is 'open access', that is, freely available online. They estimate that a bit less than 60% of medical literature in that time period can be accessed electronically. We also find that Thomson's ISI Web of Knowledge has 20 million users from 81 countries accessing a database of 22,000 journals, 23 million patents and much more. All good supporting data for my second hypotheses, about the increasing availability of human knowledge. But I would love to see the growth rate for new data coming into that database, and I can't find it.
However, I did find this--an article called 'Eastward ho! --The geographic drift of global R&D' written in March 2007 by Bob Sternbridge. It touches on a number of topics I've written about below, and has some interesting numbers:
- The number of computing patents filed in China has risen from 2,000 to 20,000 in five years! Clear doubling in the right time frame. (Pity the increase was not replicated in Japan or Korea, which were also included in the study)
- The number of communications patents filed in China has also risen in the same time frame, from 8,000 to 30,000--again a doubling! Sadly, again not replicated in Japan or Korea.
- More importantly, the total number of Chinese patent applications is growing by 25% per annum. But the article then says that Japan and US patent filings have been flat or declining in recent years. And a lot of the patent filings are by multinational corporations
- R&D spending in China has risen from 89.6 billion yuan in 2000 to 245 billion yuan between 2000 and 2005
- The number of researchers in China grew 77% over the ten years from 1995 to 2004
I think it will take me a couple of hours to digest this and incorporate it into previous posts. More later.
Comments