Patent citation indicators: One size fits all?

Jurriën Bakker, Dennis Verhoeven, Lin Zhang and Bart Van Looy

No 545092, Working Papers of Department of Management, Strategy and Innovation, Leuven from KU Leuven, Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB), Department of Management, Strategy and Innovation, Leuven

Abstract: The number of citations that a patent receives is considered an important indicator of the quality and impact of the patent. However, a variety of methods and data sources can be used to calculate this measure. This paper evaluates similarities between citation indicators that differ in terms of (a) the patent office where the focal patent application is filed; (b) whether citations from offices other than that of the application office are considered; and (c) whether the presence of patent families is taken into account. We analyze the correlations between these different indicators and the overlap between patents identified as highly cited by the various measures. Our findings reveal that the citation indicators obtained differ substantially. Favoring one way of calculating a citation indicator over another has non-trivial consequences and, hence, should be given explicit consideration. Correcting for patent families, especially when using a broader definition (INPADOC), provides the most uniform results.

Keywords: patent citations; EPO; USPTO; PCT; patent family; multivariate analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ger, nep-ino and nep-ipr
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in FEB Research Report - MSI_1609

Downloads: (external link)
https://lirias.kuleuven.be/retrieve/394181 MSI_1609 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Patent citation indicators: One size fits all? (2016)
Working Paper: Patent citation indicators: One size fits all? (2016)
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:ete:msiper:545092

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers of Department of Management, Strategy and Innovation, Leuven from KU Leuven, Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB), Department of Management, Strategy and Innovation, Leuven
Bibliographic data for series maintained by library EBIB ().