Mucke criteria, but instead by a patent examiner. Moreover, the motivations for filing a patent application and for submitting a manuscript for publication in a scientific journal differ substantially: while a paper is intended to offer data that allow new insights, a patent application is filed based on the expectation that the invention claimed therein could have practical applications within the next few years. This endows the “patent information universe” with an application-driven perspective instead of a science-oriented one, and therefore the patent record can potentially offer a very different perspective on new developments. The concepts of “novelty”, “obviousness”, and “inventive content” are of central importance in patenting but their meaning in the framework of intellectual property is quite different from the way academic research commonly interprets them; rather, these terms are applied in a strictly defined legalistic fashion. For example, combining a particular antihypertonic drug and a particular diuretic can have “novelty”, even though members of the antihypertonic and diuretic drug classes have been combined for decades to treat hypertonia synergistically. The only proviso is that the particular combination being claimed as new has not been explicitly described prior to the filing date of the patent application (the priority date) in a fashion that makes it – in principle – accessible to the public, even if it has not been published in the academic sense. Even if the particular combination of drug species has been described earlier as being effective in treating hypertonia, a ratio between the compounds (or a dose) that is outside the previously described range can suffice for novelty. To carry the example further, “obviousness” is not defined by what a research cardiologist would view, but rather by what the “average knowledgeable person in the general field” (in this case, a pharmacologist with no research and development ambitions) could deduce by combining facts reported in the public “prior art” – without doing any experimental work. On the other hand, any publicly available reference that predates the priority date of the patent application and describes the exact content of the claimed invention will negate novelty (and might create obviousness even if the description is not exact), and for this it does not have to appear in the academic or patent literature. For anybody who wants to have his or her work represented in both the academic and the intellectual property universe, it is essential to file the patent application before submitting the manuscript to a journal or making a congress presentation. Using a comprehensive database of ophthalmological patent applications we have already reported case studies that demonstrate how patents can either anticipate the 266 submit your manuscript | www.dovepress.com Dovepress Dovepress appearance of information in the peer review literature, or else can contain information that is never published in scientific journals.1 However, no systematic investigation had been undertaken at this time concerning whether inventions claimed in patent applications are also reported in the peer review literature. Such analyses of paired papers and patents in medical sciences are extremely scarce, and have mainly focused on the suspected restrictive influence of patenting on the dissemination of scientific information.2–4 The present paper reports a pilot study that analyzes the most recent international patent application record in three major fields of relevance for vascular risk management (arterial hyper- tension, atherosclerosis, and aneurysms), and relates this information to the peer review record as represented in the United States (US) National Library of Medicine’s PubMed literature database. Materials and methods The World Intellectual Property Organization’s Patent- Scope database5 was searched for the keyword terms “hypertension”, “atherosclerosis”, and “aneurysm” using date delimiters July 1, 2010 and January 31, 2011 and ignoring patent classification codes. Retrieved intellectual property documents were examined for their actual specific content concerning the above subjects; documents that named these conditions without specifically dealing with the subject matter were discarded. For example, documents that actually claimed drugs for treating diabetes and addressed hypertension and/or atherosclerosis only as diabetic complications were omitted from consideration, as were documents claiming drugs for dyslipidemia that named atherosclerosis. Also, documents that referred only to new crystal forms or other minor physical modifications to known active agents were omitted, while documents claiming innovative new formulations were included. For each identif ied patent document, PubMed was searched for papers published from the patent document priority date onward and naming at least one of the inventors as an author. If the patent content suggested MeSH terms or free-text keywords, an additional search was conducted based on these terms. PubMed hits were then examined based on their abstracts (and full texts if available) to identify “companion papers” to the respective patent documents. A peer review paper was considered a companion paper if it had at least one inventor as an author, and captured the scientific and/or technical essence of the patent document. (Note that a peer review paper with a content largely identical to that of a patent that were published prior to the patent’s Vascular Health and Risk Management 2011:7