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A survey of intellectual property rights literature from 1971 to 2012: The main path analysis

Intellectual property rights (IPRs) protection is strategically crucial for multinational corporations which are heavily conducting technology innovation to keep their technological superiority, competitiveness, and return of innovation investment. Developed countries are concerned that unequal protection of IPRs may result in a significant loss through unauthorized imitation in other countries while developing countries think that stronger IPRs would increase the costs of technology acquirement and raise the price of consumer products. The differences in IPR policies have led to significant disputes in international trade. Over the past four decades many researchers have investigated various issues regarding the protection of intellectual property rights. This paper adopts a unique approach to review the development trajectories of IPR research over the past four decades. We use ISI web of science (WOS) as the data source to retrieve the related literature and their citation data, and then apply the main path analysis on the citation data to identify the key-route main paths of the citation-based network. A total of 3184 papers and their citation data were retrieved and analyzed. The key-route main path discloses three different focuses on the research of IPRs - the scope of the patents, the preferences of the North and the South, and patent reform.