Examining between-sectors knowledge transfer in the pharmacology field

Understanding knowledge transfer patterns is essential in providing valuable insights for shaping innovations and supporting economic growth. Our study identifies the main contributors and patterns of knowledge transfer within the pharmacology field from 2000 to 2019 by analyzing citation linkage and collaborative information between sector categories, affiliated institutions, and biomedical entities in articles from the Web of Science database. Our main contribution is mapping the knowledge transfer flow and identifying the main contributors to knowledge transfer within the pharmacology domain. We manually categorized affiliated institutions into four sector categories to observe knowledge transfer patterns. Subsequently, we performed a citation linkage analysis at three levels: sector categories, institution names, and biomedical entities. The results show that academic institutions are the most significant contributors to knowledge transfer in the pharmacology field, followed by commercial and government institutions. Although the majority of knowledge transfers originated from academic institutions, our study uncovered notable transfers from commercial to academic sectors and from government to academic sectors. Through named entity analysis on diseases, drugs, and genes, we found that research in the pharmacology field predominantly concentrates on subjects pertaining to cancers, chronic diseases, and neurodegenerative disorders.