Patenting

Every now and again I get an alert from Google Scholar to tell me that I have a new citation (which is used to calculate an H-Index).

I just got one and I followed it to Google Scholar.

I haven’t been in there for a while and I was perplexed to note that my year-on-year citations have dropped substantially in 2015. See image below.

Upon further investigation I discovered that this is because I am hardly getting any citations for my 70-odd patent families whereas in years previous I was getting many.

Noting that my patents are spread across at least a dozen entirely unrelated fields of practice, does this mean the rate of patenting has dropped off in 2015?

Maybe a question for a patent attorney to answer…