Since few years, bibliometric techniques have found new applications directed closely towards company needs. Bibliometrics is especially suitable for supporting a Competitive Technical Intelligence process for big and middle companies. The Competitive Intelligence tracks all activities of direct or indirect competitors. The Competitive Technical Intelligence is focused on information useful for research and development activities of competitors. The constant growth of data sources, the constant growth of the complexity for understand the fragmentation of these data prompt the companies to integrate automatic analysis of data.
This presentation will show the contribution of bibliometrics in Competitive Technical Intelligence activities by examples of organizations, treatments and results for some French companies. We will focus the presentation on the differences between the bibliometric process for a usual national research evaluation and for an industrial competitive analysis. And we will finish by showing bibliometric softwares specifically developed for fulfilling the needs of companies in statistical treatments of textual data for Competitive Technical Intelligence.