The research presented in scientific meetings are a major way to maintain the connection between science and technology in most engineering-related fields. However, although conference papers constitute predominant proportion of publications in some disciplines, the extent to which they are able to be cited in patents compared to journal articles is less known. In order to examine this, bibliographic information of a sample of 111,108 Scopus indexed papers including journal articles (53%) and conference papers (47%) across 30 disciplines in two years (1996 and 2006) was searched in Google Patents (GP) using Bing search engine. An ordinary least squares regression model demonstrated that conference papers and journal articles were almost equally predictive of patent uptakes in most fields, suggesting that proceeding can be as important as journal articles if technological value is meant to be assessed. Although patent uptake of both journal articles (2.9%) and conference papers (1.9%) was relatively low, disciplinary differences should also be considered since journal articles are acting better in fields such as biomedical engineering and bioengineering, but conference papers are significantly better in geotechnical engineering, automotive engineering and computer science applications. Furthermore, it takes slightly more years for conference papers than journal articles to be cited in patents.
