Dovepress filing date would invalidate the patent, therefore extending the PubMed search to earlier periods was not considered meaningful). Results Tables 1–3 present the key data of the identified international patent applications, and relate them to their companion peer review papers. Hypertension: Of the 26 documents identified, 19 came from 16 different companies while seven had been filed by universities, hospitals, or foundations. The great majority (21 documents) concerned themselves with pharmaceuticals, while the remaining five dealt with biomarkers, surgical methods, or model algorithms. Only seven patent applica- tions had direct peer review equivalents. Atherosclerosis: Only eight patent applications were identified, with an even distribution between public and private assignees; six concerned pharmacological treatments; four had companion papers. Aneurysm: Fourteen international patent documents, also with assignees evenly distributed between the corporate and noncorporate domains, were published during the period covered by our investigation; four had peer review equivalents. With the exception of three submissions claiming diagnostics, all were concerned with repair and stabilization devices. Five documents focused on cerebral aneurysms. In total, 15 out of 48 patent applications had companion papers and 30 had at least one corporate assignee. Of the 15 patent-paper pairs, nine were published by academic or foun- dation inventors while six came from corporate inventors. A closer look at the publication dates revealed that in all but two of those cases where a companion peer review paper had been published, it had appeared in print earlier than the corresponding patent document. This became even more pronounced if electronic publications ahead of print were included in the consideration (data not shown). Therefore a strong dichotomy resulted: while for the majority of patents the information was not available in peer review format at all, those cases where the information was also published in peer review journals tended to reach the public earlier in their peer reviewed versions. In several cases the paper preceded the corresponding patent by a year or more. Discussion Patent documents are very different from scientific jour- nal papers in terms of intent, semantics, pre-publication critique, and publishing policy. The primary purpose Vascular Health and Risk Management 2011:7 Patents and companion papers in vascular risk management of submitting a manuscript to an academic journal is to communicate new scientific data and information concisely to a specialized audience of peers. At least two of these peers will anonymously review the manuscript and decide its fate according to the commonly accepted criteria of the scientific community. In contrast, a patent is filed with the perspective of securing exclusivity of use with respect to future commercial applications and to strategically preserve the inventors’ and assignees’ competitive edge. The requirement for legally explicit statements frequently leads to the use of language that is considered repetitive, redundant, or outright trivial by the average scientist working in the respective field. Review is by a single, personally identified examiner who is not necessarily an expert in the particular field, and who conducts the review according to legally defined criteria without attempting an assessment of feasibility (such as, for example, whether a particular vascular repair device would make sense in clinical practice). Regardless of the result of this examination, every patent document is published within about 18 months of its filing date unless the submission is retracted. Virtually every single one of these features of a patent document runs counter to what academic researchers in the life sciences or in medicine expect from a published paper. As a result, life scientists frequently ignore patents while researchers working in technical, engineering, or software development fields traditionally value them highly. This analysis of patenting versus peer-review publishing in three major fields of vascular risk management shows that disregarding published patent documents as a source of novel information can severely limit researchers’ knowledge: 33 out of 48 documents had no direct equivalent in the peer review literature. Interestingly, this lack of matches was most pronounced in the field of hypertension which, as we had expected, had the most patent documents. However, there were a surprisingly low number of relevant patent documents identified overall so that conducting an actual comparative analysis for each field would not have been meaningful. The analysis shows a dominance of corporate over academic and nonprofit organization assignees, however, the dominance is a relatively slight one (63%). The present investigation did not involve direct comparison with equivalent earlier periods, but analyses that are available for US patents show that allowing US universities to claim title to inventions that had been made with federal funding have dramatically increased academic representation in submit your manuscript | www.dovepress.com Dovepress 267