Editorial: Patent Citations to Webology Journal on the USPTO Database

Patents are an important link of science and technology in any field. The role and influence of patents on scientific research has become increasingly important in recent years. The purpose of the present research was to analyze citations to the Webology journal in patents issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). This study begins with an overview on the importance of patents citations to journals and compares the citation counts provided by the USPTO for Webology, as an open access journal in the field of Library and Information Science (LIS) and Computer Science. This study indicates to what extent the Webology journal is used and cited by inventors in the USPTO. We analyzed the distributions of patent citations to Webology. The results show that the total number of patent citations to Webology papers on the USPTO was 13. It seems that technical papers (technology-oriented papers) related to the World Wide Web and search engines published in Webology attracted more citations from patents.