Tracing the technological trajectories of transdermal patches: based on citation analysis and topic modelling

The patent documents used in this study were obtained from the IncoPat global patent literature database. This is a global patent database containing complete patent applications from 120 countries and regions. The IncoPat database uses natural language processing technology to translate other languages into English versions. In addition, the IncoPat database can identify patents belonging to the same patent family but filed in different countries. The search formula for this study is TIAB=(透皮贴 OR 经皮贴 OR transdermal* system OR transdermal* patch OR dermal* patch), which covers all conditions where the keywords appear in the titles and abstracts of the patent documents. The search was conducted until 25 September 2024. After the patent search and data cleaning, a global patent application document dataset of 7,543 transdermal patch technologies was obtained, and a total of 7,048 items after merging patents from the same family.