Reliance on Science: Worldwide Front-Page Patent Citations to Scientific Articles

47 Pages Posted: 4 Mar 2019 Last revised: 8 Dec 2019

See all articles by Matt Marx

Matt Marx

Cornell University, SC Johnson College of Business; NBER

Aaron Fuegi

Boston University

Date Written: November 15, 2019

Abstract

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 vs. false positives. We outline several avenues for strategy research enabled by these new data.

Keywords: knowledge diffusion, patents, innovation, science, technology transfer

JEL Classification: O3, O31, O33

Suggested Citation

Marx, Matt and Fuegi, Aaron, Reliance on Science: Worldwide Front-Page Patent Citations to Scientific Articles (November 15, 2019). Boston University Questrom School of Business Research Paper No. 3331686, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3331686 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3331686

Matt Marx (Contact Author)

Cornell University, SC Johnson College of Business ( email )

NBER ( email )

1050 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
United States

Aaron Fuegi

Boston University ( email )

595 Commonwealth Avenue
Boston, MA 02215
United States

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