Science linkage index, which is the average citation frequency of scientific literatures in patents, has been a useful means for analyzing the relationship between scientific research and innovation. This indicator, however, does not reflect any information contained in the scientific literatures. In this study, we made a list of scientific literatures cited by influential patents, and gained bibliographic information by checking them up with Science Citation Index (SCI). From this analysis, we found that Japan is the third biggest producer of scientific literatures cited by influential patents, next to the U.S. and UK. And one global trend became clear that universities are great contributors to producing scientific knowledge as a source of patent inventions. The contribution of Japanese governmental research institutes is smaller than other countries. Finally, we found three problems with which Japanese life science is faced now, 1) number of patent applications is small, 2) patent inventors do not utilize scientific knowledge extensively, and 3) there are relatively fewer scientific literatures as a source of world-class patent inventions.
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