The major purpose of patents is to protect technical inventions. As a rule of thumb, an inventor (and the patent attorney) should aim to achieve the broadest possible scope of protection for the invention. Our basic research question is, whether this rule proves helpful under all circumstances. We aim to answer this question by means of an informetric approach, focusing on bridging patents between several application fields of a technology. Prior work has identified patents that build bridges between two or more application fields of a technology. So far, these bridging patents have only marginally been analyzed to obtain an idea of how the “bridging” intensity is achieved. One purpose of our paper is to fill this gap and characterize patents of this kind by means of an approach based on text mining, claim analysis, and forward citation analysis. We select the case of carbon fiber reinforced plastics as an example, focusing on four application fields for which we develop a basic patent set. We identify in this patent set semantic anchor points, and - subsequently - bridging patents of different intensity. We expand our patent set by accepting a slightly lower precision level, which leads to a considerably higher recall value. We find that bridging patents comprise a greater number as well as a higher complexity of claims than non-bridging patents. Interestingly, the relationship between the intensity of bridging as an independent variable and forward citations as a dependent variable is described by a u-shaped curve. This answers the basic research question in the way that when writing a patent application, inventors should bridge strongly or focus.

专利的主要目的是保护技术发明。根据经验，发明人（和专利代理人）应力争为发明提供最大范围的保护。我们的基础研究问题是，该规则是否在所有情况下都证明是有用的。我们旨在通过信息计量学的方法来回答这个问题，重点是在技术的多个应用领域之间架设专利。先前的工作已经确定了在技术的两个或多个应用领域之间架起桥梁的专利。到目前为止，仅对这些桥接专利进行了少量分析，以了解如何实现“桥接”强度。本文的一个目的是通过基于文本挖掘，权利要求分析和正向引文分析的方法来填补这一空白并表征此类专利。我们以碳纤维增强塑料为例，重点研究四个应用领域，为此我们开发了一套基本专利。我们在此专利集中确定语义锚点，然后-桥接不同强度的专利。我们通过接受稍低的精度级别来扩展我们的专利集，这将导致更高的召回价值。我们发现，与非桥接专利相比，桥接专利包含更多的权利以及更高的复杂性。有趣的是，桥接强度作为自变量与正向引文作为因变量之间的关系由u形曲线描述。这回答了基础研究的问题，即在撰写专利申请时，发明人应该紧密联系或集中精力。