A Study of Iranian Scientific Productions on Patenting and its Comparison with those of Scientifically Advanced Countries

This scientometric research was conducted through correlation-analysis, and intended to assess the correlation between publications and patents both in developed countries and in Iran. The present study was performed using scientometric methodology and used USPTO for patent data and Scopus for publication data from 2015 to 2019. This study applied both parametric and non-parametric statistical analyses. Moreover, the Spearman Correlation analysis was used to determine the correlation between variables and types of variables. The data analysis was conducted using SPSS1 software. The relationship between these two variables was significant in each of the years under study. Different types of scientific documents, such as books, articles, and conference papers, were assessed. The Pearson Correlation analysis between these types of documents showed significance at 0.01 level in the articles with the correlation coefficient of 0.858, books with the correlation coefficient of 0.867, and conference papers with the correlation coefficient of 0.874, which was related to the extent of patenting. The subject areas related to social sciences and humanities, engineering and technical sciences, medical sciences, and biological sciences with the correlation coefficients of 0.866, 0.861, 0.843, and 0.834, respectively, at 0.01 level, revealed a significant relationship between the studied countries’ scientific output in these subject areas and the extent of patenting. The results of the present research showed that there was a positive relationship between the studied countries’ scientific output and their level of patenting. The countries that enjoy high levels of scientific output have more inventions. However, the results for Iran indicated that the growth in scientific output has had an insignificant effect on the country’s invention rate.