Bibliometric study of the cooperation in the engineering and scientific publications related to furniture design

This paper provides an overview of scientific and patent publications in furniture design and their connections from 1972-2020. The scientific publications were searched in the Scopus database, while the number of patent documents available in The Lens database was an indicator of the innovations in furniture. 1,465 scientific publications and 2,880,188 patent documents were identified. The results show that: authors from China and the USA published the largest number of scientific works, authors from the USA are the most often cited, there are 15 outstanding institutions from which the authors of the largest number of analyzed articles come, i.a.: University of Zagreb (Croatia), Poznań University of Life Sciences (Poland), Central South University of Forestry & Technology (China), Wood Technology Institute (Poland), Delft University of Technology (Netherlands) and others. The analysis of co-authorship shows cooperation in four groups of countries: (1) Brazil-Netherlands-Portugal, (2) the United States and a wide group of cooperating countries, (3) China-UK-Japan, and (4) Croatia-Poland-Turkey. The annual number of scientific publications and patent documents are strongly correlated. The increase in the number of scientific publications is much more than the increase in the number of patent documents. The statistical Granger causality test does not predict the patent documents' annual number trend by the scientific publications time series. The results presented in this article may facilitate scientific cooperation in "furniture design" showing leading authors and institutions.