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Who cited my paper? How to find the patents that cite your research

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To find the patents that cite your papers, open the Patents tab of your Helikon profile: Patents that cite this research lists the U.S. patents that cite your published work, and each paper's window lists the patents that cite that paper, who owns each one, and whether the inventors or the patent examiner added the citation. You need a free account.

Before you start: the citation count on each paper counts other papers, from OpenAlex. To see which papers cite yours, OpenAlex and Google Scholar list them. The patents are different: they show which companies and universities are building inventions on your work.

Step 1See every patent that cites your work

Go to your profile and open the Patents tab. Below your own patents, Patents that cite this research lists the patents that cite any of your papers, the ones that cite the most first. Each shows its title, number, owner, and grant year, how many of your papers it cites, and which ones. The line at the top says how many patents there are in all and how many of your papers they cite.

The Patents that cite this research section of a researcher's Patents tab: "129 patents cite 41 of their papers. Showing the 25 that cite the most.", with patents owned by Northwestern University, each showing how many of the researcher's papers it cites and which ones.

Step 2Open your research outputs

Go to your profile and open the Research outputs tab. Set Sort to Most cited. Highly cited papers are the likeliest to be cited by patents as well, though not always.

A researcher's Research outputs tab sorted by most cited, with each paper's title, authors, type, journal, year, and citation count.

The same works for anyone else's profile, and for any paper you find on the Literature tab of Discover.

Step 3Open a paper

Click a paper's title. The window shows the journal and year, the type, how many times other papers cite it, the authors, the abstract, and its topics.

A paper's window: "Mimicking the Escherichia coli cytoplasmic environment activates long-lived and efficient cell-free protein synthesis", Biotechnology and Bioengineering, 2004, a journal article with 456 citations, its two authors, the abstract, three topics, and the first patents that cite it.

Step 4Scroll to Cited by patents

Below the topics, Cited by patents lists the patents that cite the paper, the most confident matches first, with a count such as "Showing 25 of 47". Each one shows:

  • The patent's title, which opens it on Espacenet, the European Patent Office's free patent search.
  • The patent number.
  • The owner, usually the company or university the patent is assigned to.
  • Who added the citation, Cited by the applicant or Cited by the examiner, when the patent record says.

The Cited by patents list for the 2004 paper, "Showing 25 of 47": patents owned by GreenLight Biosciences, Cornell University, R.P. Scherer Technologies, Sutro Biopharma, and Leidos, each with its number and, where the record says, Cited by the applicant or Cited by the examiner.

If a paper has no patents citing it, the section doesn't appear.

Step 5Read what the list tells you

  • The owners. These are the organizations putting your work into products. In the example, two companies own several patents each that cite the same paper, and that kind of repeat is worth a closer look, for a sponsored research conversation or a license.
  • Who added the citation. A citation added by the applicant means the inventors themselves pointed to your paper. One added by the examiner means the patent office found it relevant during review.
  • The dates. A run of recent patents means the field is moving now.

For the full picture of a company, open its organization page from Discover, Organizations.

What the list covers

The list comes from matching the scientific references printed in U.S. patents to published papers, and it includes the patents in Helikon's patent record. The Patents tab and each paper's window show up to 25, the most confident first, and say how many there are in all.

If some of your papers aren't on your profile, read How to create your researcher profile and import your publications and patents. To make it easy for those companies to find you, read How to write a researcher bio that gets you found.

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