Measuring relatedness between technological fields

Intensified technology convergence, increasing relatedness between technological fields, is a mega-trend in 21st century science and technology. However, scientometrics has been unsuccessful in identifying this techno-economic paradigm change. To address the limitations and validity problems of conventional measures of technology convergence, we introduce a multi-dimensional contingency table representation of technological field co-occurrence and a relatedness measure based on the Mantel-Haenszel common log odds ratio. We used Korean patent data to compare previous and proposed methods. Results show that the proposed method can increase understanding of the techno-economic paradigm change because it reveals significant changes in technological relatedness over time.