Transfer of parasitology research to patents worldwide

Highlights

• Given enough time, up to 15% of parasitology papers have an industrial impact.
• In the USA, the UK and France the most articles with industrial impact are published.
• Infections known as the neglected tropical diseases are attracting industry interest.
• Malaria is the parasitic disease that generates the greatest industrial interest.

Mankind has known about different parasitic diseases since ancient times. There is no doubt that parasites are the infectious agents that have caused the most deaths throughout history. But even today, parasitic diseases affect more than one billion people worldwide. In this paper, the relationship between articles published in the area of parasitology and international patents in this field from 1996 to 2019 was analyzed. For this purpose, Scopus has been used. This is a database developed by Elsevier, which, in addition to having numerous indexed journals and books, has developed SciVal, an analysis tool with which the publications that have been cited in the patents of the 5 largest patent offices in the world have been analyzed. The analysis has allowed us to study 2814 publications, to know their time trend, their Authors, Affiliations, and Countries, as well as the journals in which they have been published. Also, the topics and topic clusters related to parasitology that appear in publications cited in international patents have been known. Thus, the existence of six Topic Clusters that group 94% of all publications has been discovered. Of all of them, the Topic Cluster referring to malaria stands out above all others, with 968 articles (34% of the total), probably due to the fact that malaria continues to be, to this day, one of the great challenges for both industry and basic research throughout the world.