Reliance on science: Worldwide front‐page patent citations to scientific articles

Matt Marx and Aaron Fuegi

Strategic Management Journal, 2020, vol. 41, issue 9, 1572-1594

Abstract: Research summary To what extent do firms rely on basic science in their R&D efforts? Several scholars have sought to answer this and related questions, but progress has been impeded by the difficulty of matching unstructured references in patents to published papers. We introduce an open‐access dataset of references from the front pages of patents granted worldwide to scientific papers published since 1800. Each patent‐paper linkage is assigned a confidence score, which is characterized in a random sample by false negatives versus false positives. All matches are available for download at http://relianceonscience.org. We outline several avenues for strategy research enabled by these new data. Managerial summary To what extent do firms rely on basic science in their R&D efforts? Several scholars have sought to answer this and related questions, but progress has been impeded by the difficulty of matching unstructured references in patents to published papers. We introduce an open‐access dataset of references from the front pages of patents granted worldwide to scientific papers published since 1800. Each patent‐paper linkage is assigned a confidence score, and we check a random sample of these confidence scores by hand in order to estimate both coverage (i.e., of the matches we should have found, what percentage did we find) and accuracy (i.e., of the matches we found, what percentage are correct). We outline several avenues for strategy research enabled by these new data.

Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (51)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.3145

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:stratm:v:41:y:2020:i:9:p:1572-1594

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0143-2095

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Strategic Management Journal from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().