The Use of Science for Inventions and its Identification: Patent level evidence matched with survey

Sadao Nagaoka and Isamu Yamauchi

Discussion papers from Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI)

Abstract: While backward citation information disclosed in patent documents is often used for tracing the scientific sources of innovations, it is still poorly understood how well the backward citations trace the actual knowledge flow from science. This paper directly evaluates both the completeness and the noise of the inventor citation information, linking the results of an original inventor survey on scientific sources to the dataset of non-patent literatures (NPLs) revealed in the entire patent document. We find that patent citations to NPLs are not only noisy but also highly incomplete. More important science sources are not necessarily more revealed. However, controlling for the propensity to cite NPLs, our estimation results show that the revealed NPLs are more likely to predict the existence of important scientific sources when the inventor refers to highly cited scientific literature early after its publication. We also find that the NPLs revealed at the place where an invention is described provide important additional information in identifying science sources.

Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2015-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ino, nep-ipr and nep-pr~
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.rieti.go.jp/jp/publications/dp/15e105.pdf (application/pdf)

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:eti:dpaper:15105

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion papers from Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by TANIMOTO, Toko ().