Vascular Health and Risk Management Open Access Full Text Article Dovepress open access to scientific and medical research R e V i e w Relating patenting and peer-review publications: an extended perspective on the vascular health and risk management literature Hermann AM Mucke HM Pharma Consultancy, Vienna, Austria Correspondence: Hermann AM Mucke HM Pharma Consultancy, Hutengasse 69, Vienna 1160, Austria Tel +43 664 101 0121 Fax +43 664 77 101 0121 email office@hmpharmacon.com Purpose: This investigation identifies patent applications published under the international Patent Convention Treaty between July 2010 and January 2011 in three significant fields of vascular risk management (arterial hypertension, atherosclerosis, and aneurysms) and investigates whether the inventors have also published peer reviewed papers directly describing their claimed invention. Results: Out of only 48 patent documents that specifically addressed at least one of the above- mentioned fields, 15 had immediate companion papers of which 13 were published earlier than the corresponding patent applications; the majority of these papers were published by noncorporate patentees. Although the majority of patent applications (30 documents) had at least one corporate assignee, 18 came from academic environments. As expected, medical devices dominated in the aneurysm segment while pharmacology dominated hypertension and atherosclerosis. Conclusion: Although information related to hypertension, atherosclerosis, or aneurysms that was claimed in international patent applications reached the public quicker through the corresponding peer review document if one was published, more than two-thirds of the patent applications had no such companion paper in a scientific journal. The patent literature, which is freely available online as full text, offers information to scientists and developers in the fields of vascular risk management that is not available from the peer reviewed literature. Keywords: hypertension, atherosclerosis, aneurysm, patents as topic, publishing Introduction There is no shortage of published information in the field of vascular risk management. In mid-February 2011, a PubMed search with the stringent term combination “blood vessels” [MeSH Terms] AND “risk management” [MeSH Terms] returned 3,603 hits, of which 535 had been published in 2010 or later; 600 were freely available as full text. These figures probably capture the majority of the PubMed-listed papers which have some degree of focus on vascular risk management, although an exact assessment of indexing precision is impossible because there is no single “correct” way to index a biomedical paper. (The current indexing practice in PubMed is a combination of MeSH terms provided by authors and those assigned by experienced human indexers at the National Library of Medicine, with algorithmic assistance). However, neither the scientific journals that are included in the PubMed database nor the peer reviewed academic literature as a whole constitute a full representation of the public biomedical knowledge. A vast amount of information is published in the form of patent applications which are not peer reviewed according to scientific submit your manuscript | www.dovepress.com Dovepress DOI: 10.2147/VHRM.S14454 Vascular Health and Risk Management 2011:7 265–272 © 2011 Mucke, publisher and licensee Dove Medical Press Ltd.This is an Open Access article which permits unrestricted noncommercial use, provided the original work is properly cited. 265