The Contribution of Spanish Science to Patents: Medicine as Case of Study

Transfer of parasitology research to patents worldwide

Mankind has known about different parasitic diseases since ancient times. There is no doubt that parasites are the infectious agents that have caused the most deaths throughout history. But even today, parasitic diseases affect more than one billion people worldwide. In this paper, the relationship between articles published in the area of parasitology and international patents in this field from 1996 to 2019 was analyzed. For this purpose, Scopus has been used. This is a database developed by Elsevier, which, in addition to having numerous indexed journals and books, has developed SciVal, an analysis tool with which the publications that have been cited in the patents of the 5 largest patent offices in the world have been analyzed. The analysis has allowed us to study 2814 publications, to know their time trend, their Authors, Affiliations, and Countries, as well as the journals in which they have been published. Also, the topics and topic clusters related to parasitology that appear in publications cited in international patents have been known. Thus, the existence of six Topic Clusters that group 94% of all publications has been discovered. Of all of them, the Topic Cluster referring to malaria stands out above all others, with 968 articles (34% of the total), probably due to the fact that malaria continues to be, to this day, one of the great challenges for both industry and basic research throughout the world.

A Decade of CRISPR Gene Editing in China and Beyond: A Scientometric Landscape

Since its Nobel Prize-winning breakthrough in 2012, CRISPR-Cas-based gene-editing system has emerged as one of the most promising biotechnologies in decades. In this article, we present an objective and comprehensive evaluation of CRISPR-based gene-editing technologies, including base editing and prime editing, based on the bibliometric analysis of 22,902 published records. We also assessed the status of CRISPR gene-editing technologies in academia from 2010 to 2020 globally, with respect to countries, institutions, and researchers, and used text clustering methods to assess technical trends and research hotspots. Our results indicate, not surprisingly, that this is a thriving and prominent area of research. By comparing the relevance and growth of CRISPR gene-editing technologies in China with other countries by several metrics, we show that the Chinese scientific community attaches considerable importance to the field of plant genome engineering, with more scholars from agricultural sectors than other sectors.

Bibliometric Studies and Worldwide Research Trends on Global Health

Global health, conceived as a discipline, aims to train, research and respond to problems of a transboundary nature in order to improve health and health equity at the global level. The current worldwide situation is ruled by globalization, and therefore the concept of global health involves not only health-related issues but also those related to the environment and climate change. Therefore, in this Special Issue, the problems related to global health have been addressed from a bibliometric approach in four main areas: environmental issues, diseases, health, education and society.