Compare methods

	Tech Mining	Patent Analysis
Field	Science Technology Studies	Science Technology Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2005	1994
Originator	Alan L. Porter & Scott W. Cunningham	Francis Narin (patent bibliometrics) and the patent-analytics community
Type	Text-mining methodology for competitive technical intelligence	Document-based technological-intelligence process
Seminal source	Porter, A. L., & Cunningham, S. W. (2005). Tech Mining: Exploiting New Technologies for Competitive Advantage. Wiley. ISBN: 9780471475675	Narin, F. (1994). Patent bibliometrics. Scientometrics, 30(1), 147-155.
Aliases	Technology mining, S&T text mining, Technical intelligence mining	Patent analytics, Patent bibliometrics, Patent landscaping
Related	4	4
Summary	Tech mining is the text mining of science and technology information—the publication, patent, and proposal databases that record the world's research and invention—to extract competitive technical intelligence. Coined by Alan Porter and Scott Cunningham, it turns large, fielded bibliographic corpora into actionable answers about who is doing what, where, with whom, and along which trajectories. By extracting entities such as authors, institutions, countries, keywords, and assignees and analysing their co-occurrence over time, tech mining profiles emerging technologies, maps research landscapes, and supports R&D management and innovation policy decisions.	Patent analysis, or patanalytics, mines the documents and metadata in patent databases to generate technological intelligence. Because patents are structured, dated, classified, and citation-linked records of inventive activity, analysing patent counts, citations, classification codes, applicants, and text reveals who is innovating where, in which technologies, how fields connect, and how the technological landscape is shifting—evidence that feeds competitive intelligence, R&D strategy, and foresight.