Content analysis of the technological domain vegetable oil combustion

The patent document is a measurement unit for scientific and technological productivity commonly used as a technological indicator. Patent studies mainly focus on frequency counts by year, country, assignee and inventor. There are scarce studies on the technical classifications and contents of the invention. The aim of this paper is to propose the use of the International Patent Classification and content analysis of some fields of the patent document as a unit of measurement and analysis to conduct a study on patent metrics in the technological domain vegetable oil combustion. A set of simple and relational indicators were used and the software proINTEC analyzed the data. The interpretation of the results proves that the information contained in patent documents from this domain is relevant for the goals of the project in the present case study.