Fig 1.
Annual performance improvement rates (KJ) for 27 domains.
The value of KJ for each domain is the slope of a linear curve fitted to log of the performance metric versus time using data from 1976 until 2013. The rates vary widely, from 3 to 65 percent. Adapted from Magee, Basnet, Funk and Benson 2016.
Table 1.
Examples of text from patents describing interactions, and associated keywords.
Fig 2.
Cross-domain usage of keywords (KW) ‘parasitic’ (panel a) and ‘prevent’ (panel b) across 27 domains.
The keyword ‘parasitic’ is not widely used; in fact, 12 domains do not use the ‘parasitic’ keyword at all. Compare this to wide cross-domain usage of keyword ‘prevent’. The count of KW presented is a normalized count of the respective keyword, with normalization carried out against 100 thousand total words.
Fig 3.
Comparison of count of normalized 6-keywords (KW) for 27 domains.
The count of KW is the normalized total count of 6 keywords identified to indicate interactions in the text (abstract, title, background, and summary of invention) from the 100 most-cited patents in each domain, where normalization is carried out with respect to total number of all words in the text, and expressed per 100 thousand words.
Fig 4.
Scatter plot of KJ (annual improvement rates) and 1/KW (reciprocal of normalized count of keywords for 27 domains.
Improvement rates are positively correlated with Pearson correlation coefficient = +0.56 with p-value = 0.002, and Spearman Rank Order correlation = +0.632 with p-value = 0.001. Note that capacitor and electric power transmission data points overlap, and hence appear as one point. The dashed line shows a linear trend line between KJ and 1/KW.
Fig 5.
Scatter plot of Pearson correlation coefficients for KJ (improvement rates) and 1/KW (reciprocal of normalized count of keywords) for 20 groups.
The average correlation coefficient (r) is +0.59 with standard deviation of 0.10. The coefficient value for 27 domain as a whole is 0.56. Each group consists of a combination of 14 randomly selected domains from the 27 domains.