Linkages among science, technology, and industry on the basis of main path analysis

Abstract

Compared to the science-technology linkages, the linkages among science, technology, and industry are largely under-studied. Therefore, this paper proposes a main path analysis based framework to discover the science-technology-industry linkages, in which scientific publications, patents, and products are viewed as respective proxies of scientific research, technological advance, and industrial development. To validate the feasibility and effectiveness of our framework, after the DrugBank dataset in pharmaceutical industry was downloaded in XML form on 1 November 2019, this dataset is further enriched, drug entity mentions are recognized from scholarly articles and patents, and several citation cycles are eliminated. The scientific publications span from 1871 to 2019, and patents from 1953 to 2019. There are 8,421, 5,590, and 2,136 article, patent, and drug nodes and 41,200 citations in the largest weakly connected component of the constructed heterogeneous citation network. From empirical analysis on the largest weakly connected component, main conclusions can be drawn as follows. (1) The discovered developmental trajectories indeed encode the interactions among science, technology, and industry. Science and technology not only interact with each other, but also jointly promote the development of the industry, and the industry, in turn, influences the advancement of science and technology. (2) The developmental modes in the pharmaceutical industry can be grouped into three categories: pushed by only science, pushed by only technology, and pushed by science and technology simultaneously. (3) The drugs bridge scientific research and technological advance, and thereby help enhance knowledge exchanges between science and technology and shorten the cycle of drug development. This study contributes to discovering the linkages among science, technology, and industry from the perspective of mutual citations among scholarly articles, patents, and products. However, a scientific verification of our framework in other industries apart from pharmaceutical industry still needs to be further investigated.