Reliance on Science: Worldwide Front-Page Patent Citations to Scientific Articles
47 Pages Posted: 4 Mar 2019 Last revised: 8 Dec 2019
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: Suggested Citation