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This paper seeks to propose a method of discovering uncommercialized research fronts by comparing scientific papers and patents. A comparative study was performed to measure the semantic similarity between academic papers and patents in order to discover research fronts that do not correspond to any patents.

The authors compared structures of citation networks of scientific publications with those of patents by citation analysis and measured the similarity between sets of academic papers and sets of patents by natural language processing. After the documents (papers/patents) in each layer were categorized by a citation‐based method, the authors compared three semantic similarity measurements between a set of academic papers and a set of patents: Jaccard coefficient, cosine similarity of term frequency‐inverse document frequency (tfidf) vector, and cosine similarity of log‐tfidf vector. A case study was performed in solar cells.

As a result, the cosine similarity of tfidf was found to be the best way of discovering corresponding relationships.

This proposed approach makes it possible to obtain candidates of unexplored research fronts, where academic researches exist but patents do not. This methodology can be immediately applied to support the decision making of R&D investment by both R&D managers in companies and policy makers in government.

This paper enables comparison of scientific outcomes and patents in more detail by citation analysis and natural language processing than previous studies which just count the direct linkage from patents to papers.

A survey of Japan's new religions (1) shows “ancestor worship” (2) to have played an important part in various religious bodies (3), as a means for attaining happiness for the living. Generally speaking, new religions advocate that the adequate veneration of ancestors leads them to enter a “blissful state”, as a result of which they can bring happiness to their living descendants (4). At the same time, the new religions also teach that lack of proper consolation for ancestors results in misfortune for the living (5). This tendency to put importance on ancestor worship is a particular feature of the Reiyu‐kai group of new religions which denotes those religious bodies which were established by schism within Reiyu‐kai (lit. the Spirit Friends' Society) and by the subsequent re‐splitting of those bodies (6) which resulted. The parent organization, Reiyu‐kai, is a large‐scale new religion of lay Nichiren origin (7), which was founded by Kakutaro Kubo and Kimi Kotani in 1925, and its doctrine of memorial rites for ancestors, concentrating on the combination of ancestor worship and faith as found in the Lotus Sutra, draws upon that of the Bussho Gonen movement founded by Toshizo Nishida (8).