Most cited journals in coronavirus patents according to Lens.org

The scientific literature cited in patents on coronaviruses is analyzed with the aim of determining its characteristics, identifying the main journals, and evaluating the possible correspondence between the impact of these publications in the scientific and technological fields. For this purpose, the Lens.org patent search engine and its two predefined sets of patents on coronaviruses were used, one of a general nature and the other more specific (on treatments and vaccines). Among the results, the use of persistent identifiers and bibliographic metadata extracted from other academic-scientific platforms such as Microsoft Academic or PubMed, among others, stands out. However, debugging and standardization of the bibliographic data in Lens is required, because duplications have been detected. Although the most cited journals, namely the Journal of Virology and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, do present a similarity in their positioning in the top positions of the rankings of Journal Citation Reports (JCR) and Lens, the rest of the journals that are most cited in patents on coronaviruses do not have high impact according to the JCR index of the Web of Science. Inequalities are evident when comparing the scientific with the technological impact of the journals cited in patents, and indicators other than traditional bibliometrics are needed to evaluate scientific journals cited in patents from the technological perspective.