While the aggregate patent statistics give some support to the hypothesis
that COVID-19 had a negative effect on late stage R&D across the board, given the fact that patent applications from the USPTO and CIPO do not make patent applications publicly searchable until months after their filing dates, we are unable to currently use this source to identify the pandemic’s effects on areas related to AI and data science more precisely. Thus, we collected statistics on the other output measure related to late stage R&D – counts of journal and conference publications related to AI and data science.
For our purpose, we primarily focused on items indexed in Engineering Village (EV)5 which provides access to twelve engineering document databases that include journals, conference proceedings, trade publications, patents, and government reports, and confirmed the trends with additional searches on the material indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) Science Citation Index Expanded6 and Conference Proceedings Citation Index7 databases. The text of the EV and WoS basic searches are provided in Appendix A.
This figure answers the question of whether there has been a pandemic-related impact on publications related to AI and data science. The upwards growth over the time period 2010-2019 is remarkable and clearly shows the explosion of research output in these areas. Moreover, there is clearly a break in this trend dated from the onset of the pandemic where the annual growth rate went from 22.1% in 2019, to -3.7% in 2020.
5 www.engineeringvillage.com/home.url
6 https://clarivate.com/webofsciencegroup/solutions/webofscience-scie/
7 https://clarivate.com/webofsciencegroup/solutions/webofscience-cpci/
