Patent Citations as a Measure of Knowledge Flows: The Influence of Examiner Citations

Juan Alcácer and Michelle Gittelman
Additional contact information
Juan Alcácer: Stern School of Business, New York University
Michelle Gittelman: Stern School of Business, New York University

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2006, vol. 88, issue 4, 774-779

Abstract: Analysis of patent citations is a core methodology in the study of knowledge diffusion. However, citations made by patent examiners have not been separately reported, adding unknown noise to the data. We leverage a recent change in the reporting of patent data showing citations added by examiners. The magnitude is high: two-thirds of citations on the average patent are inserted by examiners. Furthermore, 40% of all patents have all citations added by examiners. We analyze the distribution of examiner and inventor citations with respect to self-citation, distance, technology overlap, and vintage. Results indicate that inferences about inventor knowledge using pooled citations may suffer from bias or overinflated significance levels. Copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Date: 2006
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (335)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/rest.88.4.774 link to full text (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:tpr:restat:v:88:y:2006:i:4:p:774-779

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().