**3. Results**

The results achieved from this search, of Spanish scientific papers cited by international patents from 1998 to 2018, have yielded a value of 41,068 cited publications. As expected, almost all these publications are journal articles, more than 96%, being anecdotic the case of the books (Book and Book series) with just over 1% and the conference proceedings with just over 2%. These works have been written by 313,458 co-authors, of which there are 161,046 different authors, identified by their Scopus ID. Most frequently, authors contribute to only one publication, which is the case for 35.5%, those with two are 7.5%, those with three are 3%, those with four are 1.5%, and those with five are less than 1%. By way of exception, there are 50 authors with more than 50 contributions cited by patents. This case study would be particularly interesting to study.
